Abstract
This paper examines a vibrant online community called Female Fashion Advice, which exemplifies convergence culture because its members both produce and consume its content. This large subreddit offers a compelling alternative to traditional fashion journalism and empowers women to partake in a hobby that has been denigrated due to its association with femininity. Using grounded practical theory, we found that fashion is treated as serious leisure, as evidenced by displays of personal effort, career progress, and an emphasis on enduring benefits. However, women in this community also struggle to keep fashion from becoming unpaid labor. The tension between leisure and labor emerged as women discussed fashion as meaningful, enjoyable, and enriching, but also stressful and socially required. We argue that this is an aspect of convergence culture, which has collapsed the distinction between media producers and consumers, and therefore made the line between leisure and labor blurry.
For better or worse, new media has decentered authority and given everyone with an Internet connection the ability to be a creator of content rather than merely a consumer. Research on “convergence culture” has studied the consequences of audiences becoming media producers, and this convergence has had a massive impact on the world of fashion. Fashion journalism is no longer centered exclusively on big-name designers or the editors of major magazines; bloggers and social media influencers may have as much – if not more – influence on fashion trends. Rocamora (2012) notes that the first fashion blog was created in 2003 and that there were at least two million fashion blogs by 2012. She explains that, “far from simply recycling or appropriating stories already covered by the traditional media, bloggers often generate new, alternative content” (p. 98). Additionally, “communities of interest” devoted to fashion have no single author or creator (Jenkins & Deuze, 2008, p. 9). In contrast to traditional fashion journalism or even fashion blogs and social media influencers, these communities of interest provide space for multiple authors, perspectives, and goals. This study explores one such community of interest: the subreddit called Female Fashion Advice (henceforth, FFA). On its About page, FFA describes itself as “dedicated to learning about and discussing women’s fashion” and “broadly aligned with feminist values.” This site for fashion communication is a robust alternative to traditional fashion journalism and is an excellent case study in the challenges and potential that come with communities of interest.
This project explores the tensions members of FFA expressed about fashion. We found that the Serious Leisure Perspective (Stebbins, 1982) provided an illuminating framework to explain how the members of FFA communicatively construct fashion as a hobby. Leisure alone did not provide a complete enough representation of the discourse, so we used labor as a contrasting and clarifying concept. In this study, we argue that just as the line between content producers and content consumers has become blurred, so too has the line between leisure and labor for members of FFA. New media scholars have already shown how corporations encourage certain types of unpaid labor for their own profit (i.e., Ouellette & Wilson, 2011) and how entrepreneurs have embraced this logic in order to monetize their personal lives (i.e., Duffy & Hund, 2015). This study shows how the difference between leisure and labor can be narrowed, and sometimes even collapsed, without any economic motivation. In fact, our analysis will show how members of FFA worked hard to keep fashion in the realm of serious leisure instead of allowing it to become unpaid labor.
We begin our study of FFA by contextualizing communities of interest with a brief overview of the scholarly literature on fashion journalism and fashion blogs. We then explain how leisure, labor, and the self are closely related in convergence culture. Next, FFA as a research site and our methodology is described. The analysis focuses on how participants displayed personal effort, career progress, and the enduring benefits of investing time in fashion as a hobby. Although FFA is best understood as a community for women who engage in fashion as serious leisure, this is a communicative accomplishment as members work to keep fashion from becoming unpaid labor.
Fashion Journalism, Blogs, and Communities
Fashion is the socially constructed meaning of clothing and accessories. Clothing is that which is worn, but fashion is what that clothing means to oneself and others. Deciding what to wear is a crucial part of identity construction for most Western women (Banim, Green & Guy, 2001) as there is no neutral or “unmarked” choice (Tannen, 1993). In her book Why Women Wear What They Wear, Woodward (2007) explains, “As she chooses what to wear, she has to negotiate a balance between fitting in, dressing appropriately and looking and feeling like herself. The act of dressing is therefore the moment where social expectations and personal preferences conjoin” (p. 2). Since fashion is inherently social and dynamic, fashion journalism reports on the constantly changing norms for what is considered stylish (Kaiser, 2012). This has long been associated with femininity and frivolity (Lellock, 2018). The first “style” pages in major newspapers were simply a new name for the old “women’s pages,” which themselves were staffed entirely by women and not well respected (Harp, 2006). Both fashion and fashion journalism have thusly been viewed as deceitful, wasteful, and vain for hundreds of years (Barnard, 2002). This orientation can also be seen in the relative lack of academic study on fashion and fashion journalism (Rocamora, 2011; see Rocamora, 2012 for a review of the existing scholarly work on fashion journalism). Men interested in fashion eschew the term, preferring to claim interest in clothing and style instead – thereby distancing themselves from the feminine associations with the topic (Weiner, 2019).
FFA is a unique research site because it is a space where fashion is not immediately devalued for being feminine and where designers, advertisers, and other powerful fashion industry forces are not central. In fact, the first two rules of this community disallow affiliate links, advertisements for blogs, companies, apps, or websites, and any marketing or market research. Instead, the community focuses on sharing knowledge about fashion, not on personal branding or building a following. There is no single “star” or individual who provides an organizing element. In contrast to social media influencers or fashion blogs, anyone can author a post. In this way, FFA is a community of interest that is fundamentally different from traditional media and even web 1.0 because it is an alternative to the hierarchical authority associated with authorship and owning the means of communication. In addition, attracting attention from the mainstream fashion industry or developing a loyal following that can be monetized is not the purpose of FFA. In fact, many posters on FFA will blur their face when sharing a picture of their outfit and posts with affiliate links are automatically deleted. This community is therefore best understood as an example of convergence culture where content producers and consumers overlap and switch roles seamlessly. We now turn to how the concepts of leisure and labor are crucial for understanding FFA and similar communities of interest.
Leisure, Labor, and the Self in Convergence Culture
Beginning in the 1970s, sociologist Robert Stebbins developed the Serious Leisure Perspective as a way to understand how people spend their free time. Within this framework, hobbies exist on a spectrum of intensity. Casual leisure, such as walking or watching television, requires little expertise or personal investment. On the other hand, serious leisure involves growing expertise and the investment of time and/or money (Stebbins, 1982). Lee et al. (2015) highlight six characteristics of serious leisure: “perseverance, career progress, display of personal effort based on advanced knowledge and training, acquisition of enduring benefits, a strongly held identity, and participation within unique social worlds” (p. 49). Women’s serious leisure is especially important to study because women face higher barriers to leisure (Bartram, 2001; Shaw & Henderson, 2005). Some of the most studied hobbies, such as fishing, running, and hiking, are traditionally male dominated. Like fashion, female hobbies may be dismissed as unimportant, wasteful, or frivolous. However, because serious leisure pursuits are so demanding and are a freely made choice, unlike labor done mainly for economic benefit, they are a rich source for identity work and the project of constructing a self. One need only think of the difference between the phrases “I enjoy hunting” and “I’m a hunter” to see the possibility for identification. Therefore, serious leisure is a tool for individuals to become who they want to be – their ideal selves.
We contrast the Serious Leisure Perspective with insights from neo-Marxism and feminism that show how women can be encouraged to perform unpaid labor in a way that is not rooted in pleasure or fulfillment but instead sees the self as the site of mandatory work. Referencing McRobbie’s early work, Duke and Kreshel (1998) noted that teen fashion magazines can be “a mechanism by which girls’ leisure time was controlled and exploited” for narrow versions of femininity, such as working toward an idealized body type (p. 52). The line between leisure and labor is therefore important but not always clear cut. Indeed, one person’s leisure is another person’s labor, and the line between leisure and labor can shift for the same person over time. Take gardening as an example. One may decide to pull weeds as a way to clear her mind from more pressing concerns. She has no expertise in plants and rarely gardens, and therefore is engaged in casual leisure. Another individual considers gardening his passion, has learned a great deal about horticulture, and has even competed in growing competitions. For him, gardening is serious leisure. A third person may detest gardening, but feel social pressure to keep a neat yard, and therefore engage in the unpaid labor of pulling weeds. And finally, a fourth person may be paid to perform the labor of gardening. The same act has a very different socially constructed meaning. What counts as leisure is “subjective” and “is actively defined as such by those engaging in it” (Stebbins, 1982, p. 254). Leisure and the self are defined in relation to each other: the individual makes an activity leisure and that leisure becomes a resource for the project of creating the self.
The distinctions between leisure and labor matter because female leisure is often denigrated as unimportant (i.e. Hacjney, 2013; McRobbie & Garber, 1977/2005), while women are also expected to perform more unpaid labor both at home and in the workplace (Cowan, 1983; Kanter, 1977). These social pressures interact so that women face significant barriers to leisure, and especially the time and social support needed to perform serious leisure (Lee et al., 2015). These challenges have not magically disappeared in the online realm, and may even be enhanced since passive consumption is discouraged in favor of active creation and participation. We agree with Driscoll and Gregg (2011) when they argue, “Blurring the distinctions between labour and leisure will not help scholars or indeed any participants in online culture to meet the challenges of this environment” (p. 567). One of the few articles that has taken an explicitly gendered lens to studying convergence culture is Ouellette and Wilson’s (2011) examination of Dr. Phil’s media empire. Their analysis shows how Dr. Phil’s television show and website both encourage women to work on themselves and their family as an ongoing project. Traditional entertainment media, such as soap operas, offered pure leisure and a distraction from domestic drudgery, whereas new media can more easily blur the line between leisure and labor. Women are encouraged to think of themselves as entrepreneurs who can shape their selves and their personal relationships through a logic of self-determination, hard work, and individualism. This study adds nuance to previous literature on fandom and convergence culture (i.e. Jenkins, 2014) by demonstrating that not all participation is the same. “Media convergence enables intense engagement with the Dr. Phil franchise, but this engagement is not necessarily pleasurable and is difficult to characterize as leisure” (p. 554). They also link this labor to the mass media industry that encourages it, highlighting the marketing of books and DVDs to help with this project of the self. As Terranova (2000) explained in her germinal work on free labor in the digital economy, “the process whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the category of free labor signals the unfolding of a different (rather than completely new) logic of value, whose operations need careful analysis” (p. 35).
We found tension in our analysis as the women of FFA negotiated the line between leisure and labor. When we studied FFA it became apparent that fashion was serious leisure for many participants. Below, we will highlight how three of the six characteristics of serious leisure – display of personal effort based on advanced knowledge and training, career progress, and acquisition of enduring benefits – were commonly communicated in the FFA community. After each characteristic we will examine times when serious leisure slipped into labor or where participants resisted this slippage. Overall, women in this community pushed back against fashion as labor as they worked to keep it an enjoyable hobby instead of unpaid labor. Before we turn to examine this process in detail, we provide more information about FFA as a research site.
Studying the FFA Community
The FFA subreddit was founded in 2010 and now has over 1.5 million members. In contrast to fashion blogs, FFA prioritizes words over images. Community members share visuals, but they are links, not embedded pictures. The women of FFA discuss traditional fashion topics such as trends and fashion norms as well as the practical aspects of fashion including shopping, body issues, outfit planning, and garment care. Lanius (2019) notes that because of anonymous user names, “the freedom from consequences provides the Redditor (a Reddit user) a wider range of expression that can reveal more honest and hostile discourse than what is shared publicly on other social media platforms or in person” (p. 416).
For this study, we examined one month of FFA in detail: December 2018. From the 231 posts users wrote during that time, we narrowed our focus to the 23 posts that explicitly engaged in metacommunication about fashion. This was telling because our goal was to examine the relationship these women have with fashion and FFA. As Couldry explains regarding digital labor, “sometimes apparently the same practice…can start to be viewed as unfair, unreasonable, and even exploitative and coercive. So the ethnographic approach here is to identify in what ways users and participants start identifying and characterizing various practices as exploitative and the various meanings that they attach to the practices” (Andrejevic et al., 2014, p. 1092). Likewise, it was most useful to focus on how participants described their membership in FFA, their orientation to fashion, and how they present this hobby to others. We also brought into our data set the top 50 comments on those 23 posts. Since comments are sorted based on the number of votes they receive, the top comments provide insight into community norms and beliefs. Even with these limited parameters, our data set was over 66,000 words.
Both authors analyzed the data. Although we pulled only one month of FFA to study in detail, the second author has been a Redditor for over 10 years, and an active member of FFA for seven years. Additionally, she was honored with the title of “valued advice giver” by the moderators of the community four years ago. This title has only ever been awarded to 101 subscribers. Her years of experience in the community have allowed her to provide an insider’s interpretation. In contrast, the first author had never heard of FFA until beginning this project. She has been “lurking” on the subreddit since that time but has never posted. Collaborating has been extremely beneficial as we bring very different perspectives to the data.
We used Grounded Practical Theory to perform a textual analysis of this large data set. Instead of starting out with predefined research questions, “the method moves back and forth between interpretive empirical studies of particular communicative practices and an evolving normative model or ‘rational reconstruction’ that conceptualizes values and principles (or ‘situated ideals’) already partly implicit in those practices” (Barge & Craig, 2009, p. 64). In other words, Grounded Practical Theory is a qualitative method that enables critical-cultural findings and value judgements to emerge by “reflective, dialectical movement between theory and practice” (Craig & Tracy, 1995, 252). We therefore used a two-phased approach where each author read the data set numerous times and noted which themes emerged inductively (Charmaz, 1983). The authors then compared their impressions and themes to refine codes. Through this qualitative process of reading, discussing, and re-reading the data and relevant literature, five main codes emerged. We realized that these codes aligned with three of the Serious Leisure Perspective characteristics explained above. Display of personal effort was evidenced by tracking, categorizing, and cataloguing. Career progress (within the context of one’s serious leisure) took the form of increasing competence through investment and evidence of expertise. Finally, FFA members described three types of enduring benefits: identifying and conforming to expectations, self-expression, and mental health. We deemed the Serious Leisure Perspective especially valuable because it was not designed to study fashion or another “female pursuit” and could therefore provide new insight. When labor was recognized as a contrasting theoretical concept, the data was reexamined and both authors did an additional round of coding. We now turn to the analysis of this data by beginning with how displays of personal effort were communicated in FFA.
Serious About Fashion
Display of Personal Effort
One characteristic of serious leisure is “significant personal effort based on special knowledge, training or skill” (Stebbins, 1982, p. 256) that a hobbyist puts into an activity compared with a novice. The sheer number of posts and comments in FFA indicate that members are indeed putting in time and effort to hone their fashion skills. Some of the endeavors individual members take on also involve substantial time and effort. For example, one member asked for advice about “completely replacing a seasonal wardrobe.” Another asked: “How did you go about developing your own personal aesthetic?” This process included curating a cohesive wardrobe in a “strict color palette” and integrating “hair, makeup and jewelry” choices. Another Redditor replied: “I’m still working on this, and I’m not sure I’ll ever stop working on it.” These requests for advice and the replies demonstrate that the posters talk about fashion as requiring significant personal effort in order to accomplish their goals.
Perhaps the most striking display of personal effort based on advanced knowledge and training was the tracking and cataloguing of clothes. In fact, the first author decided to study this community when she saw an archived “how-to” post that described the painstaking process of photographing every piece of clothing one owns, uploading the photos into an app, creating clothing categorizes, and using the app to find new outfits. Although the tutorial was posted in 2017, users would refer each other to it and it was one of the few posts that moderators added to the “guides and how-to” section of the subreddit. Other posters shared spreadsheets for calculating metrics like cost per wear. Women also raved about the benefits of using Pinterest for cataloguing and reflecting on clothes. For example: “The best advice I have received on this board was to chart out my Pinterest boards so that I could buy and plan outfits that I would actually wear and feel great wearing.” For this poster, the work of planning outfits was worth it because of the resulting positive feeling. One commenter explained, “I use Pinterest a ton…for fun, for tracking my wardrobe, for making inspo [inspiration] boards, etc.” It is notable that “fun” was the first reason she listed for using the site. Pinterest was referenced so frequently a commenter chimed in: “You inspired me to start one of my own! I had never thought to do that before, but having just about 15 pieces (as of now) in one place visually really does give me a good grasp of what I do and don't wear.” Although Pinterest was clearly a favorite, women listed many tools and resources to track, catalogue, and categorize their wardrobes. This investment of their time and effort for fun and enjoyment supports the notion that fashion is a serious leisure activity for these Redditors.
On the other hand, we also found evidence that the personal effort necessary to track clothing was not always leisure or pleasurable. The time-consuming process was sometimes justified by a logic of efficiency and productivity. One woman outlined her fashion resolutions for 2019, including, “reduce wardrobe overall size by 25% or more, keep taking outfit pics every day, make and stick to a clothing/shoes budget.” These resolutions are in line with a neo-liberal tendency to seek the productivity, control, and measurement traditionally associated with the workplace in the personal sphere. Another poster replied with the goal to, “add all my clothes to the Smart Closet app so I can track my clothing and outfits more efficiently.” The next reply concurred, “This is my goal too. I got the Stylebook app and I’m waiting until I have some time to take pics of everything (god help me).” The aside at the end acknowledges that this is an enormous undertaking that is not necessarily enjoyable. This emphasis on tracking and efficiency could be a reaction to the stereotypes of fashion as a frivolous hobby fit for immature teenage girls or overly vain women. As Schaupp (2016) found when studying self-tracking technologies, “self-tracking discourses are male-dominated” (p. 11). By embracing a masculine logic of measuring and quantifying, these women treat fashion as worthy of time and respect, but some posts also framed fashion as a burden or chore. One poster complained, “I've just wasted two hours looking for an outfit for a work party next Friday which I don't even want to attend.” Fashion, at least for those two hours, was not a leisure activity but was motivated by social and professional pressure. Fashion as labor also creeped into other posts where shopping was described as “daunting” and “stressful.”
One poster talked about shopping at thrift stores as something that started as an act of labor, but then became a leisure pursuit. “This was originally a matter of necessity, as I couldn't afford the equivalent quality new, but now it's a hobby.” Her statement highlights how the same activity can be either a “necessity” or a “hobby,” even for the same person. We now explore this idea in depth as we examine how posters described their relationship with fashion over time.
Career Progress
One of the clearest differences between casual leisure and serious leisure is that serious hobbyists establish a history in their endeavors and improve over time (Stebbins, 1982). Participants in FFA often referred to the increasing competence they had attained by engaging in fashion as a long-term hobby. One way this was communicated was by reflecting back on a time when the poster was a novice. For instance, one commenter stated, “I feel like a lot of us have been at a point where we don’t really know or fully understand our aesthetic especially when first taking an interest in fashion.” In other words, it is common for women in the community to start as beginners without much knowledge. Another commenter noted, “I read a lot on here about people honing their style as they mature.” These comments point to fashion being a hobby that develops over time and recognition of different levels of expertise.
Participants also spoke about how they moved beyond the novice status. One comment highlights a typical journey to learn how to dress: … in a way that is both comfortable and aesthetically pleasing to ME. Learning that was a LOT of trial and error. All of the aspects of where I have settled myself come from time and experience; nostalgia; influence from my elders, mentors, and peers; my personal philosophy of life; and music and art and artists that I love.
Tellingly, many women talked about how FFA helped them develop and make progress in fashion as a hobby. FFA was recognized as a community for women who shared an interest and wanted to help one another advance. One woman gratefully stated, “posting super long, chatty posts saves my husband from having to hear me drone on about this stuff!” Another replied to a post with the plea, “Please be my fashion guru! We sound very similar physically and stylistically but you sound like you are better at it!” Wherever Redditors were in their fashion journey, they assumed there was progress to be had and recognized that other community members may have higher levels of expertise. As one woman put it: “It took me years to cultivate my style and wardrobe, and it makes me feel good that people recognize that.”
Interestingly, many women talked about the progress they had made in keeping fashion as a leisure activity and not as labor. This contradicts the notion that those most knowledgeable about fashion would attempt to turn their expertise and online recognition into paid work, such as Instagram influencers who seek sponsors (Duffy & Hund, 2015). One poster reflected on her fashion journey and resisted the notion of a long-term fashion plan: Am I gonna go back to my old wardrobe one day—the one I so psychotically curated to the point of obsession? I’d like to. But who needs the stress of being a certain size or wearing a certain style? Will that make me happier or is a five year fashion investment plan just more neurotic junk meant to take my focus away from the real five year plan stuff: a happy marriage, a healthy daughter, a killer career, a debt-free life …
Rejecting fashion as a form of unpaid labor was not just about efficiency or displaying personal skill. One woman advised readers to be wary of creating routines that could spiral into labor that becomes emotionally draining: “Be careful not to get overly ‘obsessive’, though … If ‘self-care’ stops being relaxing and becomes a chore, step back and re-evaluate things.” Here, we see her questioning a discourse of taking care of the self that can lead to more unpaid labor for women. Another poster recognized how letting fashion become labor would take away from it as a leisure activity when she stated, “I want my clothing to bring me happiness, not cause more work.” For her, work and happiness were at odds with each other. For others, we saw tension between fashion as leisure or labor. One woman admitted that, “sometimes I miss being really thoughtful about my outfits, but sometimes I’m also really happy to opt out of that obligation.” Her relationship to fashion had changed: she used to be “really thoughtful” but had moved away from “that obligation.” Nevertheless, she missed her previous relationship with fashion, which highlights the ambivalence and contradiction we saw when examining FFA. We now turn to the final part of our analysis: the enduring benefits that make all the time investment and tracking worthwhile.
Enduring Benefits
The final characteristic of serious leisure is the acquisition of enduring benefits (Lee et al., 2015). Casual leisure may provide pleasure in the moment, but serious hobbyists’ benefits are long-term. Stebbins (1982) provides eight durable benefits: “self-actualization, self-enrichment, re-creation or renewal of self, feelings of accomplishment, enhancement of self-image, self-expression, social interaction and belonginess, and lasting physical products of the activity” (p. 257). We found evidence of all eight of these benefits in the data.
Some women wrote about the social pressure they felt to present themselves in a certain way, and the benefits they received for conforming to these expectations. This was particularly acute in this post: I know it's made a huge amount of difference because I get comments a few times a week about my look, which is a strange thing- people noticing. My husband also comments on it and tells me how much he loves my "classy" look. I also notice that it seems to command a lot more respect from my kids- dressing sloppily with no attention or confusion about color, fit, etc. etc. made me come off incompetent and eroded my authority with them…and it wasn't even conscious for any of us. That's a hard cold reality to have to face, and it's been interesting to see how their response to me has changed.
In spite of the pressure to dress a certain way, many women emphasized how they had learned to reject external pressures and reclaim fashion as a space for self-expression. For example: I always struggled with what ‘look’ I wanted to adopt. I believe that fashion is the ultimate form of self expression and it is so complex in our society. I was dressing to please my parents, to feel ‘grown up’, to be ‘cool’, to fit in, to stand out, to hide my perceived flaws, to align with internal misogyny, but I wasn't really in tune with what made me feel the most true and comfortable. I have been subscribed to this subreddit for a long time and having the space to read about fashion and see how people dress on a daily basis all over the world and have fun with it really helped me understand there is more than just 1 way to dress. Your note about dressing to please and fit into all those other roles really hit home for me. I still struggle with this (at 38!!) but only in the past few years have I come to peace with things I thought were 'bad' about me before…Its still a daily struggle at times, having to remind myself that I'm the one living this life in this body and going through the day in these clothes, but I still catch those thoughts coming in at times.
Some women on FFA talked about fashion as more than a way to display a pre-existing identify; it was also crucial for cultivating a healthy interiority. One woman simply stated, “I wear what makes me happy/feel good.” Others went into more detail on the connection between fashion and mental health: My therapist urged me to start dressing myself once a week. I noticed when I did this, I would feel better about myself… Obviously dressing myself isn’t a cure for depression, and I’m under the care of a doctor, but I have to say, putting clothes on my body has really impacted my day-to-day life in a positive way.
Overall, the women on FFA talked about fashion as a time consuming but ultimately worthy hobby that deserved development over time. This investment was talked about explicitly: “Seriously, most of my clothes outlast my relationships, so I'm more invested in my clothes than short term relationships.” This long-term relationship with fashion was communicatively constructed as a positive and life-affirming pursuit instead of a source of unpaid labor or social obligation. As one woman put it: “my clothes have to be an advocate for my life instead of another burden.”
The belief that fashion could be a life-affirming hobby, much like one might consider running or communing with nature, was most clear with women who struggled with chronic illness. “After getting sick I really tried to be invisible. I’ve been wearing really baggy clothes like sweats and long shirts but it’s really time to start looking like I give a damn about being alive.” Likewise, one commenter adopted her grandmother’s personal style in honor of her: “I wore red lipstick nearly every day for a full year after my grandma passed—it was her signature.” In these ways, fashion was not just a lighthearted distraction from everyday life or a reflection of personal taste for members of FFA. The community encourages its members to construct fashion as a crucial part of their lives.
Conclusion
This study offers a rare view of fashion communication that is native to convergence culture. By attending closely to how women engaged in metacommunication about fashion on FFA, we avoided dismissing or devaluing their experiences. We found that as users communicatively constructed their view of fashion, discourses around self-care, efficiency, self-expression, and self-creation all vied for attention. No matter what values drove membership in the group or an interest in fashion, FFA supported fashion as a hobby worthy of significant time and attention. This in itself was empowering for community members as they displayed personal effort, career progress, and enduring benefits from a hobby that has historically been denigrated.
In some ways FFA was still struggling to construct the most valuable orientation to fashion. At first glance, the inconsistencies we noted in our analysis makes sense because women varied in their individual career progress and in the amount of time they had invested in FFA. However, the most interesting inconsistencies occurred within the discourses of the same person. Our analysis shows how these discourses walked the line between fashion being important enough to warrant serious leisure but not so important that it became a burden. A review of the serious leisure literature did not find a similar tension in other pursuits such as kayaking or bird watching (Bartram, 2001; Lee et al., 2015). Perhaps this tension is related to the highly gendered and disciplined nature of fashion. Indeed, research on men’s fashion forums has hinted at a similar tension, arguing that users “feel pressure and/or pleasure in seeking out style-related knowledge” (Lellock, 2018, p. 77). The technical design of these communities—text-based, anonymous forums with bans on marketing and advertising—was not enough avoid that tension.
What was most interesting to us was that the women of FFA encouraged one another to keep fashion a leisure activity and not another site for unpaid labor. Turning this particular hobby into labor is tempting because fashion has long been devalued for its association with femininity. The tracking, categorizing, and cataloguing that the Redditors discussed brought to mind program management and other disciplining technologies from the corporate world and is a clear example of the “entrepreneurial femininity” that Duffy and Hund (2015) explored via fashion bloggers. Like those bloggers, members of FFA also engage in “creative self-enterprise” and “self-fashioning” that is more commonly associated with entrepreneurialism and the organizational sphere (i.e. Wieland et al., 2009). For both the bloggers and for FFA members, taking fashion seriously means that it is worthy of a lot of work and even unpaid labor. But unlike the fashion bloggers, FFA members were not engaged in building a personal brand that required them to obscure their labor as natural, instinctive, or non-existent. In other words, women in FFA were not trying to appear glamorous or effortless to each other; instead, the behind-the-scenes work was a focal point of discussion. They did not flaunt clothing purchases made based on trends, but rather prided themselves in logical, rational decision making. In this way, FFA rejected the notion that fashion is frivolous. This may be a strategy for these Redditors to justify spending so much time, energy, and potentially money on something that is not traditionally considered a hobby at all. However, legitimizing a hobby associated with the feminine by quantifying and rationalizing it does not resolve the underlying issue that women and femininity are themselves devalued.
Another possible reason for the tension we observed in FFA is that the blurring of labor and leisure is a feature of convergence culture (Terranova, 2000). Fuchs and Sevignani (2013) explain: “Online activity creates content, social networks and relations, location data, browsing data, data about likes and preferences, etc. This online activity is fun and work at the same time – play labour” (p. 237). Indeed, there is no distinction in the FFA community between content producers and consumers because they are one and the same. This active engagement is empowering but also time intensive as women create and upvote the content that meets their needs. As Fisher (2012) explains, social media environments are unique because the more users engage the less alienated they feel, even as their labor is exploited without compensation. FFA exemplifies that dynamic: the community recognized and encouraged lay female expertise, directed efforts, and long-term benefits. However, just as the women are now responsible for the work of creating and maintaining this fashion community, they are also responsible for creating their own relationship to fashion. They must navigate the line between serious leisure, which is meaningful, enjoyable, and enriching, and unpaid labor, which is instead a chore or social requirement.
Communities like FFA are important to understand because they offer a compelling alternative to traditional fashion magazines, and even to fashion blogs and social media influencers. As traditional print magazines continue to struggle and advertising dollars move online, communities like FFA could become even more popular (Hays, 2018). This does not mean that FFA has replaced fashion journalism, and indeed members of FFA may be regular consumers of traditional fashion magazines. However, it does mean that we need more research that illuminates how these communities of interest create and maintain norms, change over time, and align with or resist corporate interests. We hope this study is just one of many that takes both fashion and women’s communities of interest seriously in our brave new online worlds.
Footnotes
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Corrie Colf for serving as our research assistant on this project.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
