From aura to jargon: the social life of authentication

Abstract

Purpose Authenticity has emerged as a prevailing purchase criterion that seems to include both real and stylised versions of the truth. The purpose of this paper is to address the negotiation of authenticity by examining the means by which costume designers draw on cues such as historical correctness and imagination to authenticate re-enactments of historical epochs in cinematic artwork. Design/methodology/approach To understand and analyse how different epochs were re-enacted required interviewing costume designers who have brought reimagined epochs into being. The questions were aimed towards acknowledging the socio-cultural circulation of images that practitioners draw from in order to project authenticity. This study was conducted during a seven-week internship at a costume store called Independent Costume in Stockholm as part of a doctoral course in cultural production. Findings Authenticity could be found in citations that neither had nor resembled something with an indexical link to the original referent as long as the audience could make a connection to the historical epoch sought to re-enact. As such, it would seem that imagination and historical correctness interplay in impressions of authenticity. Findings suggest that performances of authentication are influenced by socially instituted discursive practices (i.e. jargons) and collective imagination. Originality/value This paper contributes to the literature on social and performative aspects of authentication as well as its implications for brands in the arts and culture sector.

Brand authenticity: 25 Years of research

“…In contrast to the previous research stream that uses semiology to distinguish between indexical and iconic authenticity, this research stream is more interested in the legitimizing ideological and social‐historical forces that allow icons to be endowed with indexicality (Cohen & Cohen, 2012). For instance, Södergren (2019) described authenticating acts as a citational practice mediated by authoritative performances in the context of costume dramas meant to re‐enact historical epochs. Contrary to the experiential perspective, however, where there is no longer a need for the signified meaning of marketed commodities to have a real origin, the original could be seen as a referent to many signifieds rather than to one in particular.…”

“…Some of the most-cited studies on brand authenticity are summarized in Table 1. Overall, there were a number of theories from anthropology (e.g., Belk & Costa, 1998;Vann, 2006), cultural studies (e.g., Bryce et al, 2015;O'Neill et al, 2014), philosophy (e.g., Abolhasani et al, 2017;Fritz et al, 2017), psychology (e.g., Moulard et al, 2016;Newman & Dhar, 2014), aesthetics (e.g., Goulding, 2000;Södergren, 2019), art history (e.g., DeBerry-Spence & Izberk-Bilgin, 2019;Freathy & Thomas, 2015), communication studies (e.g., Dwivedi & McDonald, 2018;Schallehn et al, 2014), tourism studies (e.g., Chhabra et al, 2003;Cohen & Cohen, 2012), literary criticism (e.g., Rose & Wood, 2005;Stern, 1994), semiology SÖDERGREN (e.g., Ewing et al, 2012;Grayson & Martinec, 2004) and sociology (e.g., Alexander, 2009;Kozinets, 2002) that were applied to examine brand authenticity. Among those studies that implemented a positivist paradigm, the majority were either well-known theories within marketing and advertising literature (e.g., brand equity, emotional brand attachment) or social psychological theories (e.g., self-determination theory, attribution theory).…”

Seeing the invisible: brand authenticity and the cultural production of queer imagination

“…Scholars have called for more research on the social, political and cultural processes through which consumer experiences are authenticated (e.g. S€ odergren, 2019;Wilson, 2011). The way consumers interpret authenticity in cinematic artwork has recently been elaborated in relation to race, specifically the black community in America (DeBerry-Spence and Izberk-Bilgin, 2019).…”