Fashion and consumer culture is an emerging theory. Trends in fashion and Consumer Culture invariably shape Fashion Culture. The role of media is important in the fashion industry. Much of fashion's politics are issues of cultural production and innovation, for both consumers as well as the brands themselves. By appropriating fashion culture discourse, consumers generate personalized fashion narratives and references that negotiate key existentialism tensions and that often express resistance to dominant fashion norms in their social milieu or Consumer Culture.
Fashion and consumer culture is about consumption, media representations of the fashion industry, consumer activism, and class and consumption. What role does clothing and personal adornment and appearance play in the daily lives of fashion-conscious consumers? And the breadth of their exposure to fellow consumers. Fashion-related behavior can represent a conscious effort to be socially provocative.
McCracken's work on meaning transfer suggests that meaning moves from the culturally constituted world via modes of advertising and communication. Scholars consider clothes as integral to the fashion process, and fashion, in turn, as a key element of clothing culture. Consumer scholars have used the sensorial idea of aesthetics to discuss fashion as adornment and the relation between the body and body image. Contemporary fashion theorists examine how fashion, particularly clothing and dress, contribute to the intensification of the normative aesthetics of the body. With Laurie A. Meamber, Annamma Joy, Alladi Venkatesh in Routledge Handbook on Consumption. Edited By Margit Keller, Bente Halkier, Terhi-Anna Wilska, Monica Truninger.
Speaking of Fashion: Consumers’ Uses of Fashion Discourses and the Appropriation of Countervailing Cultural Meanings - CRAIG J. THOMPSON, DIANA L. HAYTKO - This article explores the ways that consumers use fashion discourse to inscribe their consumption behaviors in a complex ideological system of folk theories about the nature of self and society.
The Politics of
Fashion in American consumer
culture - Heidi Khaled, University of Pennsylvania.
Abstract: This dissertation examines how fashion becomes politicized, not just as a
communicative medium, but also as an arena for political struggles taking place in global
structural processes, sites of popular culture, and the
going-ons of everyday life. "Ultimately at stake in much of fashion's politics
are issues of cultural production and innovation, for both consumers as well as
the brands themselves."
The most publicized political battles of recent years are often centered in specific apparel brands, media events and controversies that reflect an ongoing struggle between independent producers and corporations representing rebellious lifestyle brands. I explore how consumers interpret these events and consider the political, economic, social and cultural implications of their own identities as both consumers and producers. Popular ideas about dress, and in particular the hipster, diffuse into local discourses, influencing individual beliefs and behaviors and coloring interpersonal interactions.
These discourses illustrate how subcultures use dress as a means to evaluate others' levels of creativity and genuine commitment to the subculture. Media coverage of the fashion industry affects apathy and non-involvement in the politics of fashion, as many consumers see themselves as relatively powerless in a massive system and often challenge or abstain from it in small but personally meaningful ways.