Fashion Bloggers as Cultural Intermediaries: The Meaning of Brand Choices in Style Production

Abstract

The paper focuses on fashion bloggers as cultural intermediaries, which taste origins connect different audiences and groups in the fashion industry. Our sample consists of 15 blogs, which were nominated for two major awards for fashion bloggers Bloglovin.com and Stylight.com in 2015. We analyzed 1223 looks they produced for 1 year (brand choices for every look). We created a two-mode network (blogger - brand) and converted it to the one-mode network (brand-brand). The main research question is whether fashion bloggers as cultural intermediates tend to follow professional community and replicate its hierarchies or rebel against it by creating their owns. The analysis consists of 2 steps. First, we look at three dimensions of brand combination (a) mass-market and haute-couture brands (b) brands oriented to male or female audiences (c) global and local brands. Second, we apply the association rules algorithm to extract combinations of brands matching with not only by the quantity of coupling but probabilistically explore brand unions.