Audience for fashion: digital touch points, brand circulatio, and the new consumper experience

The new media ecosystem has revolutionised the experience of fashion consumption. On the one hand, fashion brands are gaining an increasing visibility in media content, becoming more and more prominent in media storytelling and digitally spreadable thanks to audience engagement; on the other hand, fashion consumers turn themselves into media audiences (and vice versa) who take advantage of a permanently accessible media system where they can appropriate brands and fashion related items, both symbolically and materially. In this scenario we may observe a definitive overlap between audiencing and fashion consumption: audiences for fashion-related content takes advantage of fashion brands’ online searchability, in order to engage in fandom-like activities such as detection, searching and poaching. At the same time, consumers experience media content as multiple touchpoints with the brand, being instantly gratified by accessing a wide range of information, made available by official brands, media coverage, and social media. The aim of this chapter is to argue that hardly any distinction exists between the domains of fashion and the media in the contemporary consumer experience. Fashion consumption takes place predominantly within the media sphere, progressively combining with audiencing practices.