Protesting Disappearance: The Drama of the Stylish Self in the World of OOTD

Abstract

The previous chapter explored the representation of an anxious social subject and a related suspicion of the veracity of the social world in a range of contemporary cinematic texts, centered on a set of French-language films from 1995–2005. This chapter will examine a slightly more recent cultural phenomenon, one linked to virtual media venues, including video-sharing sites as well as blogs and other platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr, that provides an intriguing complement to the more elaborated fictions of feature-length cinema. This is the culture of the fashion blog and the corollary vlog (video blog) and more specifically the common practice of featuring an outfit of the day (OOTD) regularly, sometimes daily, within this culture. The OOTD is examined here as a symptom of the sorts of anxieties presented in the cinematic texts but also as a kind of protest against disappearance through an automatic recourse to the backstage, reversing the ordering of regions in classical dramaturgical sociology yet at the same time assuring a gap remains between the performing agent and the fantasy of an unbarred, unmutilated subject. This case study will thus take the empirical exploration further into questions of virtual technology and especially social media platforms, as well as the particular role of fashion in processes of self-formation and performance.