City Research Online

Abstract

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.”

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved. This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Communication, Culture & Critique following peer review. The version of record Findlay, R. (2019). “Trust Us, We’re You”: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands. Communication, Culture and Critique, 12(4), pp. 553-569 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz047
Publisher Keywords:	digital media, branding, postfeminism, Glossier, Reformation, Maryam Nassir Zadeh
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity > Media, Culture & Creative Industries

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