Digital fashionistas: young women, wealth-in-followers and matronage in Yaoundé, Cameroon

Abstract

AbstractAgainst the background of post-Cold War trade and media liberalization, this article examines how young women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, share digital images of their crafted styles via WhatsApp. Such sharing is an act of influence usually aimed at building the woman’s name as a digital ‘fashionista’, in that it constitutes a virtual potential for persuading others to copy one’s style. When this potential is actualized among women of status and rank, young women can fashion relations of matronage, opening up avenues of upward social mobility. To reach out to women of status and rank, young women circulate images of their styles to mobilize digital follower networks of peers, kin and strangers, drawing on their skills, status and knowledge. This mobilization in turn relies on the actual and potential benefits that sharing a fashionista image can bring to the follower. Thus, I argue, interdependencies between stylish leaders and their followers are key to making and maintaining a name as a digital fashionista. This article contributes to the literature on fashion and social mobility in West Africa by showing how the circulation of digital images over social media networks generates potentialities for young women living in Yaoundé to fashion matronage relations and social mobility. More broadly, the framing of followers as a form of wealth-in-people provides a critique of the neoliberal market valuation of social media influencers, illuminating alternative regimes of valuation that inform digital influencer economies.