Revised Research Paper Topic

My topic, the developments of clothing advertisements throughout the past century, will attempt to deconstruct the marketing techniques of well-known, popular clothing lines. I plan to find information on the correlation between a certain type of advertising “method,” and clothing sales. For example, I think it will be interesting to look at advertising campaigns that feature celebrities (The Gap is always using famous people in their advertisements), and seeing if that really does make the product sell more. Sarah Jessica Parker, Lenny Kravitz, even now Audrey Hepburn (ah, the power of technology!) are all celebrities that The Gap employs to endorse their clothing. I am also interested in the advertisements of more prominent designers, such as Gucci and Dior, who also included celebrities in their advertising campaigns. However, I expect to find a difference in intention here; I think (before researching, anyway) that companies such as The Gap and Nike use celebrities to attract common people to their product, to catch their eye and show them that this product is reliable. I feel that more elite companies, such as Louis Vuitton, uses celebrities to show that their products are on the same “level” as celebrities, and the public should buy them in order to aspire to the kind of lifestyle that celebrities endorse.
I am especially interested to research if people will really buy into a store’s campaign for a product because a celebrity is endorsing it, verses if a regular model is. I think it will be important to research this because it prove just how much influence the media truly does have on the public, and how vulnerable and defenseless the public has become in response. As far as resources go, I intend to consult the following online databases of advertisements, as well as magazines and other information published about advertising:
http://www.bwgreyscale.com/ads/gap.html
http://www.bwgreyscale.com/ads/louis_vuitton.html
http://www.bwgreyscale.com/ads/nike.html
http://www.bwgreyscale.com/ads/reebok.html
http://www.bwgreyscale.com/ads/roberto_cavalli.html
http://www.bwgreyscale.com/ads/tommy_hilfiger.html