City-branding is usually a topic that practitioners, official bodies and academic researchers have approached from the marketing perspective, i.e. the deliberate strategy set to better “sell” a city-location to various stakeholders, from tourists to investors. The idea is to shape the city image which, as any location image, is a multidimensional phenomenon involving cognition and emotions. It has been defined as the aggregate of impressions, expectations and thoughts related to a definite place (Kotler et al., 1999; Ulaga et al. 2002). However, some scholars have found that places are “like a blank canvas upon which a series of representation are layered producing a place that is uniquely identifiable” (Staiff, 2014). Such representations include poetry, painting, film, travel writing, postcards, novels, maps, guide books and advertising. They build some imaginary of the place with physical buildings as metonymic characteristics of it, producing in the end some hyperreal meaning of the city, an iconic one (Ellul, 1988; Staiff, 2014). Therefore, studying the successive ways of staging a city in advertising, one should be able to identify the iconic elements of the city, the overall city-image implicitly built (and congruent categories of products) and in the end the culturally-built current visual imagery of the city, i.e. the one being currently promoted by city-branding marketing strategies. Particularly, fashion advertising is, as a creative industry (Howkins, 2002), part of some cultural-expression and cultural-building processes. Regular reuse of a setting would simultaneously shape the imaginary of this setting, while borrowing some of its features and facets. The setting would thus become quite quickly an iconic representation of itself (Greimas, 1966), ultimately becoming hyperreal. We use Venezia as the field of study. Our objective is to show the hyperreal nature of the current city-image, with the disappearance of distinctions between signified and sign (Baudrillard, 1994), thanks to the successive reproduction of preceding reproductions of reality in fashion ads using Venezia as a setting. To do so, we use semiotics, building some analytic grid. Particularly, we study: the general impression/feelings when observing the ad; denotation; iconic semiotic analysis including gestalt elements; lexicographic analysis of the text present on the ad; enunciation and emitter’s position; whether the ad is opaque or transparent; the connotations that derive from all previous; and the ultimate classification of the ad depending on its ideology (Floch, 1990). The final results will be ready by the time of the conference. Some interesting trends already emerge, for instance the regular empowering nature of the city for human beings represented in the ad, or the transparent nature of the ad. Besides from providing interesting conclusion on Venezia and on fashion advertising systematically using some setting, we believe the added value of the research is also in the methodological approach that could be used by official entities to understand how their city is iconically represented and craft consistent city-branding strategies, esp. when the city has some historical linkage with fashion and luxury history. Similarly, fashion marketers and advertisers would benefit from knowing about the processes behind systematic reuse of a setting with insights for all fashion-related or luxury-related cities (Paris, Milan, Florence, New York, etc.).

• Anne-Flore Maman Larraufie(ESSEC & SémioConsult, France)