Speaking of fashion: consumers' uses of fashion discourses and the appropriation of countervailing cultural meanings

Article Abstract:

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. Verbatim texts of 20 phenomenological interviews concerning consumers' perceptions and experiences of fashion are interpreted through a hermeneutic process with specific consideration given to gender issues. Whereas critics of consumer culture frequently argue that fashion discourses enshroud consumer perceptions in a common hegemonic outlook, our analysis suggests that this ideological system offers a myriad of countervailing interpretive standpoints that consumers combine, adapt, and juxtapose to fit the conditions of their everyday lives. By appropriating fashion discourse, consumers generate personalized fashion narratives and metaphoric and metonymic references that negotiate key existential tensions and that often express resistance to dominant fashion norms in their social milieu or consumer culture at large. A theoretical model is derived that portrays a dialogical relationship between consumers and this cultural system of countervailing fashion meanings. The implications of this model for future research on the meaning transfer process and the sociocognitive dimensions of consumer beliefs are discussed. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Social aspects, Analysis, Beliefs, opinions and attitudes, Fashion, Attitudes, Rhetoric

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Poststructuralist lifestyle analysis: conceptualizing the social patterning of consumption in postmodernity

Article Abstract:

In the sociology of consumption, a core research issue is the symbolic expression, reproduction, and potential transformation of social collectivities through consumption. The two theoretical perspectives that have long dominated both consumer research and sociological investigations of this class of research questions - what I term personality/values lifestyle analysis and object signification research - have become less useful in the postmodern era. In this study, I develop an alternative poststructuralist approach for analyzing lifestyles. I describe five core principles of poststructuralist lifestyle analysis that distinguish this approach from the two predominant paradigms. Drawing from a series of unstructured interviews, I argue that each of these five features allows for more nuanced description of lifestyles than the two predominant approaches. Poststructuralist lifestyle analysis can be used to unravel the social patterning of consumption according to important social categories such as social class, gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, and generation in advanced capitalist countries in which postmodern cultural conditions make tracing these patterns difficult with conventional approaches. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Consumer Behavior, Consumption (Economics), Life style, Lifestyles, Postmodernism

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Understanding the socialized body: a poststructuralist analysis of consumers' self-conceptions, body images, and self-care practices

Article Abstract:

The present inquiry examines the psychological meanings and processes that shape consumers' sense of body image and the consumption behaviors motivated by those perceptions. Poststructuralist interpretive procedures were used to analyze interviews with 30 male and female consumers, aged 6-54. This discourse analysis led to the development of three process-oriented themes: (1) the ideology of self-control, (2) the social processes of normalization and problematization, and (3) the operation of the disciplinary gaze. The systematic manifestations of these themes are illustrated across a range of consumer experiences and body-focused perceptions. Implications of these themes for the theoretical conceptualizations of body image and the nature of self-concept in contemporary consumer culture are discussed. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Psychological aspects, Body image, Self-perception, Self perception

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