Book review: Anne-Mette Hermans, Discourses of Perfection: Representing Cosmetic Procedures and Beauty Products in UK Lifestyle Magazines

become inscribed into the objects, settings and actions we find all around us – into the very stuff of our realities, to take Hjelmslev’s expression. Van Leeuwen shows how multimodality offers a set of tools for revealing how this takes place. We can study how identity manifest itself semiotically. But to know what we are looking at in the semiotics, we must understand social and historical contexts. This very point was also at the heart of RI. But, for us, Multimodality and Identity really shows how to study this. And as such provides, we would argue, an invaluable resource for discourse studies right now. This book tells us what can multimodality offer that is unique. It shows what its inventories of meaning potentials add to existing knowledge. And of course as discourse analysts this is what we are about.