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âTrust Us, Weâre Youâ: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands
Individual
critical
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied âcoolâ 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 mediaâs capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate âaspirational realnessâ 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 âcool girls.â
06.10.24