Marwick | Conspicuous and Authentic | 1 Conspicuous and Authentic: Fashion Blogs, Style, and Consumption

Fashion blogging is an international subculture comprised primarily of young women who post pictures of themselves, swap fashion tips, sell vintage clothes, and review couture collections. As such, these women participate in the global flow of consumption while simultaneously producing fashion media which is read worldwide. Fashion blogging exemplifies a type of "conspicuous consumption " which is less about signaling free time and more about signifying "style " which is presumed authentic and personal. In this paper, I explore how fashion bloggers are complicating theories of conspicuous consumption and information flow. The types of interactions with luxury, mass-market, and secondhand goods that bloggers value are those that simultaneously embrace sped-up fashion cycles and resist "top-down " fashion journalism. Identity presentation online through the use of consumer goods cannot simply be explained by current theories of the conspicuous. I outline three refinements to conspicuous consumption theory that can help explain these dynamics. First, incorporating audience theory; second, emphasizing motivation and using ethnographic methods to uncover this; and third, looking at status as specific and located rather than global