Business & Finance

New Forms of Status via Curation in the Sharing Economy: Unravelling the Seams of Peer-to-Peer Fashion Rentals

Our study examines the relationship between the fashion industry and the sharing economy, specifically peer-to-peer fashion rentals curated and styled by social media influencers. In addition to clothing rentals, styling platforms provide curation and taste for the consumer, a form of field-specific cultural capital (Rocamora 2002).

New forms of status and exclusivity have manifested online through these platforms with online influencers at the helm. We conduct an ethnography of three of the leading fashion rental platforms, all based in London.

Our research has the potential to positively impact the scholarly community, economy, and society. This provides important implications for sharing economy platform brands, allowing for new ways to imbue status via sustainability claims. The sharing economy has not brought about the positive sustainability and social benefits that were hoped for (Schor 2020), however the role curation plays has the potential to transform access platforms to deliver on pro-social outcomes.

Instagram account: @the_fashion_rental_project

Research Funding

King's Business School Incubator Fund: £10,000

Aims

In this project, we will thus study, develop new theory, and provide practitioner tools based on this emerging personal style phenomenon rooted in the sharing economy. This has important implications for the development of sharing economy platforms in the future as well as fundamental shifts in consumer behavior that have not been fully explored to date.

Methods

From a methodological perspective, we will be employing a qualitative approach. Given that we want to access the consumer experience using fashion focused access platforms, we adopt an ethnographic approach (Humphreys and Carpenter 2018; Huff, Humphreys and Wilner 2021). We focus on three British peer-to-peer clothing rental platforms, and engage in netnographic and ethnographic immersion with all three platforms, focusing on both the brands themselves as well as the consumers using them. This will allow us to understand the emerging status dynamics from an emic perspective (Geertz 1975).

Impact

In this project, we will study, develop new theory, and provide practitioner tools based on this emerging personal style phenomenon rooted in the sharing economy. This has important implications for the development of sharing economy platforms in the future as well as fundamental shifts in consumer behavior that have not been fully explored to date.

Project team

Gillian Brooks

Lecturer in Strategic Marketing

Giana M Eckhardt

Professor of Marketing

Marie-Agnès Parmentier

Professor of Marketing, HEC Montréal

Work that has informed New Forms of Status via Curation in the Sharing Economy: Unravelling the Seams of Peer-to-Peer Fashion Rentals includes:

Bourdieu, Pierre and Yvette Delsaut. 1975. “Le Couturier et sa Griffe. Contribution à une Théorie de la Magie.” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 1: 7–36.

Brooks, Gillian, Jenna Drenten, and Mikolaj Jan Piskorski. "Influencer Celebrification: How Social Media Influencers Acquire Celebrity Capital." Journal of Advertising 50, no. 5 (2021): 528-547.

Delisle, Marie-Pier and Marie-Agnès Parmentier (2016), “Navigating Person-Branding in the Fashion Blogosphere,” Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 7 (3): 211-224.

Dolbec, Pierre-Yann, and Eileen Fischer. "Refashioning a field? Connected consumers and institutional dynamics in markets." Journal of Consumer Research 41, no. 6 (2015): 1447-1468.

Eckhardt, Giana M., Mark B. Houston, Baojun Jiang, Cait Lamberton, Aric Rindfleisch, and Georgios Zervas. "Marketing in the sharing economy." Journal of Marketing 83, no. 5 (2019): 5-27

Gonzalez-Rodriguez, Angela. (2021). “Online Fashion Rental Market to Grow Over 10 Percent Annually”. Fashion United. https://fashionunited.uk/news/business/online-fashion-rental-market-to-grow-over-10-percent-annually/2021111859406

Huff, Aimee Dinnin, Ashlee Humphreys, and Sarah JS Wilner. "The Politicization of Objects: Meaning and Materiality in the US Cannabis Market." Journal of Consumer Research 48, no. 1 (2021): 22-50.

Humphreys, Ashlee, and Gregory S. Carpenter. "Status games: Market driving through social influence in the US wine industry." Journal of Marketing 82, no. 5 (2018): 141-159.Labfresh. “The Fashion Waste Index”. January 2020 https://labfresh.eu/pages/fashion-waste-index?lang=en&locale=en

Marwick, Alice E. "Status update." In Status Update. Yale University Press, 2013.

McQuarrie, E.F., Miller, J. and Phillips, B.J. (2013) ‘The Megaphone Effect: Taste and Audience in Fashion Blogging’, Journal of Consumer Research 40(1): 136–158.

Rocamora Agnès (2019) #parisienne: Social Media Stratification in Visions of Parisian women, in Steele, Valerie (ed.) (2019/Forthcoming) Paris: Capital of Fashion. London: Bloomsbury.

Rocamora A. Fields of Fashion: Critical insights into Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. Journal of Consumer Culture. 2002;2(3):341-362.

Parmentier, Marie-Agnès, and Eileen Fischer. "Working It: Managing Professional Brands in Prestigious Posts." Journal of Marketing 85, no. 2 (2021): 110-128.

Van Maanen, J. 1988. Tales of the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Veresiu, Ela and Marie-Agnès Parmentier (2021) ‘Advanced Style Influencers: Confronting Gendered Ageism in Fashion and Beauty Markets,’ Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 6(2): 263-273.

Conferences

We plan on presenting our research progress at two academic conferences. The first is the annual Association for Consumer Research North American Conference, the largest consumer research conference of the marketing discipline. The second is the annual Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) Conference, the most important conference devoted to the study of consumption choices and behaviors from a social and cultural point of view.

Presenting at these two important conferences will give us the opportunity to disseminate our findings to the top scholars in our field as well as get feedback from them which can feed into the development of our primary outputs. Finally, there will be conference proceeding publications associated with these conferences.

Media coverage

We plan to submit an ensuing research paper to a four star journal such as the Journal of Consumer Research or Journal of Marketing, as well as a practitioner version of our study to a practitioner-oriented outlet such as Harvard Business Review. Publishing in these outlets is time intensive, but will have major impact on scholarly and practitioner oriented thinking.

We will also publish in impact related outlets such as The Conversation, and expect our work to be covered in major media outlets. All three applicants have well developed ties to the media and are regularly interviewed about our work in such places as the BBC, The Economist, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, etc.