After the fashion passes, my identification remains! Consumption patterns and identity construction of homoaffective clothing

Abstract

Clothing is a way of expressing, through verbal testimony, patterns of cultural principles, and being able to understand consumer behavior. Thus, through the interfaces of a symbolic product, it is possible to perceive the identity construction that individual sex press to fight against social discrimination and exclusion. Research has the study aims tounderst and the symbolic representations present in the consumption of clothing by homosexuals. Based on a qualitative approach, centered on the subjectivity of symbolic cultural meanings and supported by the family of theoretical perspectives that make up the CCT (Consumer and Culture Theory), in-depth interviews were conducted with homo-affective consumers and analyzed with Spiggle's methodological proposal (1994). The main findings found were that individuals have their own style when choosing a clothing, and try to make a mix of accessories and clothing to be able to suit their personal taste, so clothing is understood as a language and can express communication, for stimulate the individual's tactile and visual relationships. Given this, the body also represents a way of expressing identity, whe ther through piercing or tattoos.

Luxury consumption and the temporal-spatial subjectivity of Hong Kong men

“…The participants' subjective conceptions and rhetorical accounts of luxury consumption defy any universalised, objective, sociodemographically segmented, consistent definitions. This opposes the assumptions that self-identified homosexual consumers behave significantly differently from heterosexual consumers (Eisend and Hermann 2020) and that they explicitly use luxury consumption to articulate and construct their sexual identity (Kerley de Alencar Rodrigues and Monteiro Ferreira 2021;Rudd 1996;Visconti 2008) or advocate specific political agendas (Barry and Martin 2016). Our participants' notions of luxury are mostly not about glamour, conspicuousness, or even inconspicuousness, but about specific temporal-spatial registrations of symbolic, pragmatic, and emotional meanings.…”