Conceptions of Authenticity in Fashion Blogging
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“They're really profound women, they're entrepreneurs”: Conceptions of Authenticity in Fashion Blogging Alice E. Marwick Department of Communication & Media Studies Fordham University Bronx, New York, USA [email protected] Abstract Repeller and Tavi Gevinson of Style Rookie, are courted by Fashion blogging is an international subculture comprised designers and receive invitations to fashion shows, free primarily of young women who post photographs of clothes, and opportunities to collaborate with fashion themselves and their possessions, comment on clothes and brands. Magazines like Lucky and Elle feature fashion fashion, and use self-branding techniques to promote spreads inspired by and starring fashion bloggers. The themselves and their blogs. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with 30 participants, I examine how fashion bloggers behind The Sartorialist, What I Wore, and bloggers use “authenticity” as an organizing principle to Facehunter have published books of their photographs and differentiate “good” fashion blogs from “bad” fashion blogs. commentary. As the benefits accruing to successful fashion “Authenticity” is positioned as an invaluable, yet ineffable bloggers mount, more women—fashion bloggers are quality which differentiates fashion blogging from its overwhelmingly female—are starting fashion blogs. There mainstream media counterparts, like fashion magazines and runway shows, in two ways. First, authenticity describes a are fashion bloggers in virtually every city in the United set of affective relations between bloggers and their readers. States, and fashion bloggers hold meetups and “tweet ups” Second, despite previous studies which have positioned in cities around the world. “authenticity” as antithetical to branding and commodification, fashion bloggers see authenticity and Fashion bloggers and their readers often consider blogs commercial interests as potentially, but not necessarily, to be more authentic, individualistic, and independent than consistent. This study adds to the growing literature on the traditional fashion media. The fashion blogosphere is online self-presentation techniques which finds that the portrayed in the media as a democratic space where entrepreneurial self-concept encouraged in professional women who do not fit into the fashion mold—rich, thin, blogging communities is intimately linked to a larger shift in cultural labor to capitalist business practice. tall, heterosexual, and white—can enjoy the creativity and self-expression of clothes, accessories, and beauty (Khamis & Munt 2010). Subsets of fashion bloggers, such as fat Introduction empowerment fashion bloggers and modest fashion bloggers, trade information, post pictures, and create visual A fashion blog is a blog about fashion, but the term is and consumerist landscapes for populations ignored by generally used to refer to “personal style blogs,” in which Vogue or Style.com. This rhetoric holds that fashion people post photographs of themselves posing in different blogging opens up spaces for “democratic” engagement outfits. Fashion blogging has grown considerably in the with clothing and fashion in a way antithetical to the last few years. The Independent Fashion Bloggers coalition rigorously patrolled fashion world. However, as Minh-ha lists more than 48,000 members, up from 3,000 in 2011 Pham points out, this “tendency to invest new technologies (Coveted Media LLC 2012). As the readership of fashion with revolutionary potential obscures and sometimes blogs has grown, so have their influence. The most famous entirely misses the ways” in which fashion blogs are firmly fashion bloggers, such as Leandra Medine of The Man contextualized within a striated capitalist framework. As such, blogs may often reinforce “classed hierarchies of DRAFT VERSION PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT aesthetics, tastes, and knowledge” (2009). Indeed, in Sarah PERMISSION Copyright © 2013 All rights reserved. Banet-Weiser’s book Authenticity, she explores the ways in which the active, agented presentation of the self online, sincerity is the opposite of hypocrisy—honesty without especially for young women, takes place within a pretense. He notes that our cultural shift from sincerity to “commercial context of branding and advertising” that can authenticity may be tied to the emergence of the modern “contain and limit young women” (2012:66). and the diminishing of traditional ties and social In this paper I use the oft-expressed ideal of authenticity hierarchies. as a jumping-off point to discuss the contradictions (or lack While authenticity as a moral imperative to be “true to thereof) between the decidedly commercial spaces of oneself” is highly valued, cultural theorists have noted that fashion blogging, where branding, marketing, and achieving it is ultimately impossible, as it is a social advertising often shapes expression, and the emphasis on construct that is always relative and context-dependent democracy and “realness” self-professed by bloggers and (Grazian 2003). As Andrew Potter relates: readers. I find that authenticity means three things to Authenticity is a way of talking about things in the women engaged with fashion blogs: first, a palpable sense world, a way of making judgments, staking claims, of truthful self-expression; second, a connection with and and expressing preferences about our relationships to responsiveness to the audience; and third, an honest one another, to the world, and to things. But those engagement with commodity goods and brands. Thus, the judgments, claims, or preferences don’t pick out real authentic is not something that exists apart from properties in the world (2010, 13). commercial culture, but a set of affective relations between Nevertheless, authenticity continues to have individuals, audiences, and commodities. While the considerable cultural value. Both Banet-Weiser and Potter emphasis on fashion/beauty goods is somewhat specific to point out that “authenticity” often indicates a non- or pre- this community, authenticity as a boundary strategy commercialized space, as in an authentic DJ or street artist between selfhood and neoliberal capitalism is a common who is co-opted by a sneaker company for commercial use, feature of entrepreneurial online communities, such as self- or an authentic Flamenco dance rather than one arranged branders, camgirls, and lifecasters. for tourists. The authentic is positioned in contradistinction to crass excesses of commercial capitalism, such as fast Literature Review food or advertising. However, modern understandings of the authentic also Authenticity speak deeply to cultural theories of people using consumer goods to symbolize or mark identity and affiliation The question of authenticity has concerned many modern (Featherstone 1991). Being authentically punk, for philosophers and theorists: namely, the distinction between instance, may include purchasing old vinyl records or what something is and what it appears to be (Potter 2010). bondage pants. Being authentically spiritual could include Charles Lowney writes that authenticity emerges with the attending yoga classes and doing a juice cleanse. Thus, it is individual, autonomous Enlightenment subject, namely, not that authenticity and capitalism are mutually exclusive, how one expresses his or her true self as an agented actor, but that capitalist practices should be engaged in while fully enmeshed in society, with its intrinsic layers of mindfully (Heath & Potter 2004). role play and performance. Sartre, for instance, offers the ultimate example of inauthenticity: a waiter who “fully Recently, scholars have documented a plethora of self- identifies with his role as a waiter” (in Lowney, 34). presentation techniques, such as self-branding and micro- Similarly, Walter Benjamin’s famous The Work of Art in celebrity, which incorporate branding and advertising the Age of Mechanical Reproduction concerns itself with practices (Hearn 2008; Senft 2008). These are particularly the difference between an object and its mimesis. In a time relevant online, where the ideal agented subject is the where original objects d’art are easily duplicated, what active entrepreneur (Marwick, 2013). One might expect distinguishes the object from its replica? Benjamin argues that authenticity is less salient in spaces where individuals that the original possesses an unmistakable aura (1968). are expected to promote themselves for status and These theories share a sense that the authentic is something attention, from pop star Justin Bieber to tech pundits like real, something true, something moral, some thing apart Michael Arrington. However, even in online environments from the crass, commercial, social world. saturated with celebrity culture and marketing rhetoric, authenticity has a significant presence (Marwick & boyd In Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), Lionel Trilling 2011). In these spaces, authenticity becomes a way for investigated the modern obsession with authenticity, which individuals to differentiate themselves, not only from each he argues to be a central concept of contemporary moral other but from other forms of media. life. Trilling distinguishes authenticity from sincerity, conceptualizing authenticity as a display of the hidden inner life, complete with passions and anguish, while Fashion Blogging sexuality, and political action happen every day” (28). Susan Herring et. al. argue that women’s online content, Pham’s paper both reinforces the limits of digital such as online journals or diaries, is systemically devalued