Fashion photography on social media: insights from Hong Kong fashion image producers

This study draws on fashion and culture theories to explore the influence of visual sharing culture on social media in fashion. The objective is to interpret the perceived creative values and the meanings of such cultural phenomenon from the perspective of fashion media industry in Hong Kong. In-depth interviews, in the exploratory semi-structured format, were adopted in which 20 fashion image producers in Hong Kong were interviewed regarding their increasing involvement in professional fashion image making and blogging. Among the 20 respondents, 12 respondents were younger generation of image producers with experience around 3 years, while 8 respondents have been in the industry for 15 years in average. The findings of this research indicated that the nature of visual oriented social media platform supports a new communication model between the new generation of fashion image producers and image audience. It is evident that there is a new trend for young fashion lovers to become successfully engaged in the industry as career bloggers who can create their styles and express their ideas through fashion imaging and sharing. On the other side, the professionalism and authenticity of the young generation of fashion bloggers are sometimes in questions. The finding is significant to further academic studies on the value of fashion visual communication on social media, and to business sectors, in which this study provides insight for young fashion lovers for career development

Influencers’ Blogging Patterns and Their Power of Shaping Consumer Purchase Decision: An Analysis from the Consumer’s Perspectives

Objectives: In conducting this thesis, the author primary aims to provide a thorough analysis on typical Influencer’s Blogging patterns that are capable of impacting consumer purchase decision. Secondly, the author intends to shed more light on the identification of the causal relationship between blogger’s recommendation and consumer behavior. Last but not least, author wish to contribute a more holistic information to the research bank about Influencer Marketing, with discussion on both major and minor issues relating to the procedure, conducts and ethical matter of this globally prevalent marketing tactics. Summary: This study benefits International Business research by addressing a global issue of Influencer Marketing strategy application. Related published articles are reviewed and findings were configured using qualitative data collection. In details, two focus group with participants are millennials with exposure to blogs and influencers were conducted. Results was then compared and contrasted to identify commonly perceived blogging patterns practiced by influencers of the field, as well as to pinpoint the scale and weight of consequent recommendations on consumer purchase decision. Discussion chapters follow to explain additional conclusion in accordance with reviewed literature. Main findings are stated along with limitation acknowledgement, international business implication and suggest for future research. Conclusions: Of all patterns mentioned in different research papers, influencers tend to adopt same application standard on content production, blogging frequency, tricks and treats, audience integration and reputation maintenance. Among five patterns, the most impactful one directly affects consumer decisions is content production. Also, the intangible relationship between influencer’s recommendation and purchase decision is solidified. With a proven existence of the correlation, analysis on other minor factors is being put on tray, generating managerial implication for mutual benefits to all of the stakeholder in the industry, namely the brands, the bloggers and the consumers

Fashionably voluptuous : normative femininity and resistant performative tactics in fatshion blogs

Peer reviewe

Got to be real: An investigation into the co-fabrication of authenticity by fashion companies and digital influencers

This article investigates how fashion companies build their relationships with digital influencers (DIs), a new group of cultural intermediaries who are increasingly central to brand communication strategies. Scholars have mostly studied DIs’ role in influencing the market, but largely neglected the process through which they build their work. Through a qualitative inductive research directed at 21 Italian fashion companies, we describe the process through which companies fabricate the authenticity work, while collaborating with DIs. By taking the overlooked perspective of the company brand owner, we identify the underlying dynamics of achieving co-fabricated authenticity, unpacking the mechanisms through which companies select DIs, shape the connections and regulate the reciprocity with them. Our findings highlight how companies and DIs’ practices become intertwined, with the commodity of authenticity being constructed at the crossroads between the former’s commercial needs and the latter’s grassroots narratives and practices. ‘Co-fabricated authenticity’ ultimately emerges as the result of the work of those actors who are engaged in managing the authenticity or processes of authentication of marketable goods: the intangible and ephemeral value of authenticity is made tangible and co-produced through the collaboration between brands and cultural intermediaries such as DIs

On 'being' online - Insights on contemporary articulations of the relational self

One of the growing research interests in media and Internet studies concerns how the self is constructed in the digital environment, while the complex relationship between the self and consumption continues to be of interest in consumer research. This thesis is an examination of relational being at the intersection of digital media and consumer culture.  The thesis takes a critical perspective to examine the conditions under which the contemporary self is constructed and how the self is articulated in digital contexts, and thus views the online as embedded in the offline. Rooted in social constructionism, the relational perspective sees the self as an intersection of multiple and shifting relations. The aim of the study is to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of self-construction in our media-saturated consumer society.  The study examines bloggers and fans and their mediated consumption practices through the lens of the social imaginary. The empirical material is collected from social media sites, plus-sized fashion blogs and YouTube, and analysed in the discourse analytic tradition combined with digital ethnography. The findings of the empirical studies show how 'aspiration' is constructed in the imaginary, with two conflicting, yet mutually constitutive notions of 'being yourself' and 'improving yourself' being negotiated at the site of the self, in the relational flow of the Internet. The studies also discuss disenfranchisement and marginalisation as properties of relationships, and show how imaginaries, in offering a range of interpretative resources for the self, also provide opportunities for counter-discourses.  The study makes several theoretical and methodological contributions: within media and Internet studies, this thesis contributes to a better understanding of the embeddedness of the digital and to the ongoing discussion of how the digital is shaping the self; within consumer research, to the theorisation of relational self in the contemporary consumer context. Treating imaginaries as semiotic systems allows us to see imaginaries as constructed terrains of aspirations with complex significations. Thus, as sources of relational tension, imaginaries can be seen as implicated in the positioning, even othering, of individuals. The study suggests that the self is a fluctuating process of various alignments and disalignments within the matrix of social, cultural, and economic forces, with momentary discursive and relational achievements translating into temporary and situated congruence with others

What She Wore: The Dialectics of Personal Style Blogging

This research examines personal style blogging to understand the strategies women interested in personal style employ online to participate in fashion culture. In 2009 and 2010 I interviewed thirty-five personal style bloggers during two separate one-month periods about their experiences as bloggers, fashion community-members, and consumers. Bourdieu's theories of taste and social spaces, as well as Swidler's theory of strategic interaction were used to analyze the data. I found that personal style bloggers engage three strategies to navigate the social field of fashion online: opposition, conditional involvement, and buy-in. Personal style bloggers self-consciously position themselves vis-a-vis the fashion industry to respond to the pressures of consumerism and self-commodification, and illustrate that the Internet facilitates production as well as consumption of women's fashion

The Poetics of Self-fashioning: Between nonsense and meaning

This paper reflects on the role of garments in the changing sense of self through the literary notions of “estrangement/ defamiliarisation” (Shklovsky) and “poetic function” (Jakobson). What are the poetic or prosaic qualities of artefacts: what is it that renders some garments mundane and others captivating, auratic, and ‘disruptive’? How and why certain clothes tell us much more about human’s need of protection or decency? I suggest that it is contingent on the relationship between self and other articulated through the notion of defamiliarisation. Shklovsky suggests that poetic language is structured, impeded, distorted speech, as opposed to economical and correct prose, that it removes the perceiver from the domain of automatic, or conventional, perception, making them pause and dwell on what is being perceived. Applying this to other domains of art, Shklovsky proposes that artistic practice aims to make objects foreign and unfamiliar, to increase the difficulty of perception, because the process of perception itself is the main purpose. (Shklovsky 1991, 12-3) The physical proximity and ubiquity often render cloth and clothing invisible, ‘nonsensical’ material. Yet precisely because of this proximity, once estranged, garments can be effective means of self-objectification. With the material qualities showing ourselves to us and touching us, garments are powerful metaphorical as well as mimetic representation of the self, at once the trace and symbol the self. Depending on our perceptiveness as a wearer, the materiality of garment can trigger a “disruption of rhythm” (ibid., 14), or defamiliarisation, allowing us a ‘poetic experience’, as Shklovsky would put it. The ambiguity, or the disrupted meanings, brought on by the estrangement however, is quickly settled into a new meaning: our need for the immutable reality, the unique unchanging self, inevitably draws a new distinct boundary. This sequential steps—the garment as a poetic device, estrangement, ambiguity, the generation of new meaning and self—is potentially unending, as the authentic unchanging self, lying in a never-attainable beyond, is faithfully pursued, but also constantly doubted and subverted. This understanding of garment as a poetic device unsettles the deep-seated surface/depth dichotomy: the self is not anything ‘hidden,’ ‘underneath’ or ‘behind’ to uncover, but transient, multiple, and constantly self-generating. Dressing practice as self-making is thus an iterative, poetic process, the constant oscillation between self and other, between nonsense and renewed meaning. This permanent passage is conducted through bodily engagement, the visceral and emotional process of interacting with the material other. The multiple realities experienced in this passage is materialized in our dressed selves, the constantly self-fashioning bodies

How fashion bloggers can influence Generation Y’s online behaviour

The purpose of this study is to examine how fashion bloggers can influence Generation Y’s online behaviour. Fashion blogs give the fashion industry a unique opportunity to reach out to a target audience in a new, easy, and inexpensive way, however, research on how fashion bloggers can influence Generation Y’s online behaviour is still limited. Based on various theories, a model was proposed for the study. A survey involving 300 fashion blog readers as participants was analysed in the empirical study to investigate whether perceived blog design layout, blogger awareness, perceived blogger credibility and perceived value/expertise influence attitude and purchase intention. Structural equation modelling results revealed that the proposed relationships were significant with the exception of blog design layout on attitude. As for blog design layout, marketing strategies could emphasise the importance of user experience and content strategy in influencing the attitude of Generation Y. The study should assist fashion bloggers to understand how perceived blog design layout, blogger awareness, perceived blogger credibility and perceived value/expertise can influence attitude, eventually leading to purchase intention. Brands will therefore need to select bloggers cautiously. This study has implications for bloggers, brands, and policy makers

Modest fashion? Dress, body, and space: an ethnographic account of Muslim female stakeholders’ experiences in the modest fashion industry

This PhD is an interdisciplinary study that provides an in-depth ethnographic account of modest fashion’s promotional spaces where Muslim female stakeholders expand their career choices towards the corporate fields. The female stakeholders in this research promote modest fashion in systematic fashion events and exhibitions and on the virtual marketing platform Instagram. More specifically, this research focuses on how these Muslim women construct a multitude of cultural and political scenes in the spaces they weave within these branding platforms for their agency display. Significantly, this research offers fresh insights by drawing a holistic understanding of the developing branding techniques in multiples spaces where modest fashion is rapidly growing in the physical world and online leading to newness and a creative staging of fashion items. This study applies a qualitative approach through ethnography to study the modest fashion culture of more than 150 research participants who have multiple roles within the fashion industry: including businesswomen, designers, bloggers, models, fashion students, and consumers. This multisite research is located in Britain: London, Leicester, and Birmingham, in Istanbul: Zorlu art Centre, and on the online: Instagram. Data is derived through the use of ‘ethnographic mosaic’ strategy (Blackman, 2010) by applying the multiple qualitative methods: observations, conversational interviews, and visual ethnography, in different locations where diverse voices are accessed from the fieldwork. The ethnographic data are analysed through a grounded theory approach while a semiotic analysis approach was adopted for interpreting Instagrammic visuals. The analysis generates a thick description of the contemporary shifts that created a space for agency and representation, and also brought new perspectives to theoretical concepts. In terms of findings, this thesis explores how modest fashion produced multiple promotional spaces where the Muslim female stakeholders develop their careers towards global brands while weaving spaces for their agency. Through cultural events, modest fashion is creatively growing a global consumer culture resulting in traces of a global culture industry where physical shopping experiences are key (Lash and Lury, 2007). Amidst these changes, key findings show that Muslim female stakeholders are challenged by stereotypes, modesty shaming online, and by the intrusion of corporates in the modest fashion retail. Yet, Muslim stakeholders had the fashion capital to balance between struggles and representations through their creativity. The thesis concludes that modest fashion carries its stability and value as a vehicle for Muslim women’s spatial expressions, creativity, and career suggestive of a feminist ipractice in which they perform an empowering act in a branding space offering new insights to agency and being a femal