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Modeling Consumption

Fashion modeling work in contemporary society

City University of New York/BMCC, USA, ewissinger{at}bmcc.cuny.edu

Fashion and branding have become powerful forces in the contemporary world. Fashion models, central players in these developments, are both lightning rods for controversy and objects of desire.To avoid the kinds of polarizing or sensationalist views of modeling that are common in academic and popular circles, this article focuses on modeling as work, to explore what models do when they fascinate or repel us via their engagement in commodification and branding processes that promote consumption. Using data from interviews with fashion models and those who work with them, the article argues that models promote consumption in far more complex ways than merely smiling for the camera.The article considers models as cultural intermediaries, discussing how they frame consumer experiences and encounters with commodities in the selection, styling and dissemination of images populated by models.Viewing models' self-commodification as forms of aesthetic, entrepreneurial, and immaterial labor, the article illustrates how these practices of compulsory image management and socializing glamorize the model `life' and so play into processes used to brand and sell urban space. Placing these activities in the context of new branding practices, the article concludes with a discussion of how the model life and the experience of being `in fashion' are being packaged and sold as a commodity in and of itself. By working hard to produce the image of living the `model life', workers in this industry model a lifestyle that is then packaged and sold to consumers as an experience that can be had for the price of their attention.

Key Words: aesthetic labor • branding • commodification • cultural intermediaries • entrepreneurial labor • fashion • immaterial labor • image production • models (persons)

Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 9, No. 2, 273-296 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1469540509104377


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