How to have style: style discourse in a makeover show and fashion consumption

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Title How to have style: style discourse in a makeover show and fashion consumption
Publication Type dissertation
School or College David Eccles School of Business
Department Marketing
Author Min, Hyun Jeong
Date 2011-08
Description This dissertation is composed of three essays about style discourse in fashion consumption. For the first chapter I developed a conceptual model to unravel the political process of meaning making between marketers and consumers. In particular, I draw on the concepts in the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe to develop the conceptual model to analyze the data of Chapter 2 and 3. The second chapter explores the mainstream discourse of having personal style with respect to fashion. For this second study, data have been collected from the TLC TV series What Not to Wear, an American reality television show that is based on a British Show of the same name. I chose episodes selected in What Not to Wear: Best of DVD with run time of 10 hours and 45 minutes. Transcripts of these episodes were produced and I analyzed how the notions of self, fashion, and style are intertwined in the discourse of the program. In this program the conflicts between the nominee and fashion consultants are prevalent components and there is some extent of negotiation between the two parties. Therefore, I also focus on this negotiation process and reveal how the hosts of the show win over the nominees. For the third chapter, I turn to the fans of the show What Not to Wear. Using postings on the web forum of the program I examined the ways fans integrate the cultural discourse of fashion on the program into their lives. Since there was an ample amount of data on the web forum, I sampled only the postings that were related to the episodes used in the second study. The focus of analysis is on the identification process of audience members: who do audience members identify with and how does such identification lead to specific ways of incorporating the fashion knowledge of the program? This study is expected to contribute to better understanding of how fashion reality shows have influence on consumption behaviors of audience members.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Discourse analysis; Fashion consumption; Makeover reality show
Dissertation Institution University of Utah
Dissertation Name Doctor of Philosophy
Language eng
Rights Management Copyright © Hyun Jeong Min 2011
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 695,806 bytes
Identifier us-etd3,52977
Source original in Marriott Library Special Collections ; GT23.5 2011 .M56
ARK ark:/87278/s6hh70tr
Setname ir_etd
ID 194709
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6hh70tr
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