Rosie Findlay

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⤢ a directory that gathers, stacks and links practices that work with, through and beyond (digital) fashion […]

LATEST UPDATE 20.08.2025

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Rosie Findlay

“Trust Us, We’re You”: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands

https://attachments.are.na/24757053/6e6027da205fcd00dae4a37a04c54e2b.pdf?1700145381

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Aesthetics, Feminism, Fashion

In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied “cool” around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital media’s capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption. This article examines three brands that circulate “aspirational realness” around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational “cool girls.”

Rosie Findlay

20.08.25

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As the online realm often feels infinite, this directory highlights non-commercial, critical, and experimental online content related (but not limited) to fashion and creative practices. It features projects, essays, visuals, and events, offering tools to navigate this dynamic landscape.

In gathering a wide variety of practitioners and collectives, we are always expanding, and looking to add to this growing bibliography of ‘being online’.

If you've encountered or created something that fits within this scope, feel free to share and submit!

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