Keywords

1 Introduction

The fashion weblog (blog) rose to prominence in the early 2000s [1, 2], joining a host of other niche, political, and lifestyle sites already in existence since the late 1990s [3]. An individual would set up an account on the Internet with a username and password and begin posting their musings about daily occurrences or style choices. These social media entrepreneurs not only created or curated content but also developed business plans to brand and monetize their posts and images [4]. Educators found the weblog genre equally useful for helping language learners to practice their acquisition of skills [5]. Students could document everyday life using their newly acquired vocabulary. These personal diaries took on the personas of the content creators, setting the foundation for future web-based occurrences documented on YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, and more recently, TikTok. However, these cultural products have resided in a social system shaped by historical, cultural, and economic forces. The purpose of this discourse analysis aims to explore and chronicle the historical trajectory of this phenomenon on a global scale [6]. Global Englishes, or English itself, enable users of Braj Kachru’s Expanding Circle countries to participate in the fashion system through a multitudinous lingua franca [7, 8]. More important, the negotiation between a mother tongue and English allows for an examination into how bloggers seek to gain cultural capital, build their individual brands, and navigate personal and cultural identity within hegemonic structures.

2 Literature Review

Three bodies of literature will be drawn from to explore the bloggers’ content and guide the discourse analysis: (a) hegemony; (b) Global Englishes; and (c) cultural capital. Each theoretical framework provides a view into the complexities and richness of the content in cultural products, as it relates to depictions of blogger identity and culture. Gramsci, Kachru, and Bourdieu’s theories anchor the study and will be discussed in the subsequent sections.

2.1 Hegemony

The dominant narrative about who participates in discourses about fashion and beauty trends, or the social practice of writing, has been informed by Western ideologies and historical contexts [9]. Early pieces about the topic started in the courts of the wealthy [10] and focused on the fineries and textiles of the leisure class. I suggest the genre’s early formation established norms of how fashion writing ought to be written and who ought to disseminate knowledge about aesthetics and matters of taste [9]. In the Gramscian tradition, fashion’s early association with elites and their fancies dominated discourses and continue to do so, reinforcing a hierarchical-based class system still evident today [9, 10]. Media allows producers to create and replicate content unlike other social groups, creating norms and disseminating dominant-hegemonic ideologies of elites [11]. Lull [11] argues large-scale media company owners and managers and now social media influencers compete and manage “key socializing institutions” in the public sphere.

Yet, as Raymond Williams [12] argues hegemonic ideas never remain fixed and change through time. Fashion system discourses [13] have evolved in meaning, shifting from residing in the leisure class domain to more expansive conversations about lifestyle journalism and blogging [14,15,16]; gender [17]; and race and class [18]. Furthermore, status quo scripts about racial and ethnic participation have focused and privileged one group from the West over another, leaving out or “othering” voices from historically marginalized groups in the Global South or the East [19].

2.2 Global Englishes

Three scholars noted for being at the forefront of the discourse about the term Global English and its many facets are Kachru [7], Robert Phillipson [20], and David Crystal [21]. Each brings their own perspectives to the topic, looking at its evolution, its usage, and its modalities. Both Crystal [21], and Phillipson [20] argue the English language has been used to help people to work across borders and to facilitate business. Crystal [21] acknowledges a language receives its recognition in a country when its citizens start to adopt it and use media to disseminate their political and everyday ideas. Pennycook [22] asserts globalization assists in a language’s spread, using his studies of hip hop and rap musicians in Malaysia and Tanzania to illustrate phenomena. Through localization/nativization [22] and code switching [8, 20], Englishes emerge that speak to the culture of its users. While the language may appear in a milieu much like hip-hop music, Pennycook [22] and Bhatt [23] argue that citizens of the language navigate and negotiate its uses by looking to their culture, language, and politics for guidance. Possessing “multilingual repertories,” as Cutler and Røyneland [24] suggest, allows for individuals to connect via computer mediated communication channels with not only family and friends but also with diverse followers.

Kachru’s Circles.

Kachru, who was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, India in 1932, and died in 2016, developed a visual of concentric circles to help articulate the spread of English and document his own experiences with the language [7, 8]. The Inner Circle varieties consist of people from the following countries: England, New Zealand, Australia, United States, Ireland, and Canada [7, 8]. The Outer or Extended appears in at least 50 former colonized countries (Cuba, Malawi, Singapore), where English appears in “chief institutions” as well as government-run media [7, 8]. The Expanding Circle represents countries (France, Japan, Brazil) that use English as a tool in a market-driven world [7, 8]. Kachru [25] writes in The Alchemy of English the language “is used as a tool of power to cultural and other norms of the political elite.” Fashion and beauty bloggers from Expanding Circle countries such as France and Japan, much like native English speakers, want to expand their reach to fashion aficionados and elite gatekeepers and participate in the marketplace [17, 26].

Scholars do interrogate the relevancy of Kachru’s model in a globalized and multinetworked society. Yano [27] suggests the geographical and regional boundaries assigned to the circles may not hold true. Instead, Yano [27] argues for more research looking into how individuals within the countries employ English and practice their proficiency with the language. However, Mufwene [28] argues Kachru’s model serves to examine how users of English in Expanding Circle countries are in fellowship with others. They may use innovative language structures not guided by the Inner Circle norms. Fashion bloggers do adopt English and may include their mother tongue to demonstrate their culture, identity, and commitment to connect with audiences.

2.3 Cultural Capital

Bourdieu’s [29] theories about cultural capital may be applied to the analysis of fashion blogger content. Writers must have the economic means and educational background to learn English. Knowledge acquisition also can occur through English books and media. He argues aesthetic acuity comes with a decoder’s “cultural competence” and ability to encode messages into their own works [29]. Furthermore, the social practice of blogging is multi-faceted with users possessing financial and technological resources to sustain their sites [3]. Fashion, beauty, and more generally, lifestyle bloggers, write content to reside in the fashion system [13]. They practice relating and relaying different “realities and fictions” about cultural topics, based on their own positionality or aspirations [17, 29]. Through posts, bloggers exhibit a level of taste and “distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar” [29]. Their assessments make them attractive to followers with similar interests or common identities, who reaffirm their fashion and beauty choices through feedback mechanisms such as likes and comments.

Methodology.

The Internet is a vast land where numerous blogs exist. However, to select global cases remained a significant task. I identified a website called Signature 9 [30, 31], a marketing intelligence company, which compiled its list of sites and editors to know. The company touted its methodological approach, which used SEO data from search engines and compiled the sharing activity data from social media sites, Facebook, and Twitter. A pilot genre analysis study was conducted for a 2013 conference paper, 10 years after the first fashion blog—nogoodforme—launched in 2003 [1]. Three blogs from France, Brazil, and Japan were explored. Signature 9 has since stopped producing its lists and the site has been deactivated. However, access to content comes through archived lists obtained through waybackmachine.com, which featured limited data. To advance the study, I obtained lists from 2013 and 2014, representing 198 fashion blogs. The data culled appeared to be at the height of the site’s popularity, based on Twitter retweets promoting the list from brands and organizations such as Cole Haan, 818 Agency, and Next Model.

Then, I entered them into NVivo qualitative software and compiled a dataset of N = 24 blogs with more than 200 posts from countries that use English to participate in global discourses [7]. I eliminated sites if they no longer existed or if they were duplicated in 2013 and 2014. Some continue to produce content, sell goods, or feature sporadic posts displayed on their home pages; they will be noted in the analysis. The study will examine the blogs from 2013–2023 to historically explore how bloggers use English to engage with their followers as technologies advance. Gee’s [6] scholar’s tools of inquiry provide questions to guide the analyses about “identities,” “sign system and knowledge,” and “politics.” The research questions being considered are the following:

  • RQ1: How do fashion and beauty blogs in Kachru’s Expanding Circle countries feature English in their content?

  • RQ2: How do bloggers use the English language to exert power, show influence, and/or demonstrate legitimacy?

Preliminary Findings.

A purposive sample drew from countries in the dataset, which included the following: Brazil (7); China (Hong Kong) (1); France (5); Germany (1); Italy (1); Japan (2); Mexico/Netherlands (1); Poland (1); Spain (2); Sweden (2); and Switzerland (1). An emerging pattern from the data showed bloggers used English in their navigation bars or post-related headlines intertextually with their mother tongue. Their identities remained at the center, with English dotting their content. Portuguese dominated the sites of Brazilian bloggers, Thereza Chammas of Fashionismo and Lia Camargo of Just Lia. However, each blogger strategically placed an English word into their content. Chammas employed key words such as “lifestyle” and “red carpet” into her discourses in Portuguese about trends, celebrities, shopping, and beauty. Comparatively, Camargo’s 2021 post about Pantone’s 2022 color of the year, “Very Peri,” relied on the American trend forecaster’s color branded content. Camargo’s gallery of “looks” showed her interpretation of the trend, with a Portuguese header titled, “para inspirar.” The influencers from the Global South exhibited their aesthetic and taste levels on sites with high-resolution color photos in galleries and content about the trends. The texts cited spoke to Gee’s [6] argument that “important connections” occur through language. Both Chammas’ and Camargo’s selection of key English words linked them to a global community, where lifestyle, celebrity, and trends dominate influencer social media sites. Their intentionality demonstrated their efforts to engage in conversations within the fashion system. They maintained their identities, while exhibiting their cultural capital by the insertion of an English word placed on the home page of their blogs.