Characteristics of the hyper-modern individual and consumption

We have now accounted for why we have applied the theories of Gilles Lipovetsky. We will next present the characteristics of the hypermodern consumer and individual into more detail. These are the characteristics, which we expect will define the fashion

consumption of the Danish urban fashion consumer.

The hypermodern individual

Lipovetsky argues that hyper-consumption and hyper-modernity influence the way we construct meaning and attitudes. Therefore we appreciate other things and values today than in earlier stages of the western society. As fashion and consumption takes up more and more of public and private life, traditional sense-making processes are replaced with new. Fashion demands that the goal of life is personal happiness, pleasure and change (Lipovetsky, 1994). It has replaced class solidarity and class-consciousness in favour of the fulfilment of our individual wants and needs – in the form of consumption (Lipovetsky, 2005). According to Lipovetsky we have reached a time when:

"The commercialization of lifestyles no longer encounters any structural, cultural or ideological resistance, and when the spheres of social and individualistic life are reorganized as a function of the logic of consumption" (Charles & Lipovetsky , 2005: 15).

To achieve a deeper understanding of the hyper-modern fashion consumer, we will next present and discuss the characteristics of hypermodern individual and consumer into more details.

The paradoxical individuality

We have never been happier while being as unhappy as we are today. We have never had more money for material needs, and this has made us value emotional needs and the search for meaning more. This is one of the points Lipovetsky makes in his book “Le Bonheur Paradoxal” (2006). Hypermodernity itself is characterised by paradoxes.

Lipovetsky describes that:

(...) the more responsible behaviour grows, the more irresponsibility increases in tandem. Hypermodern individuals are both better informed and more destructured, more adult and more unstable, less ideological and more in thrall to changing fashions, more open and more easy to influence, more critical and more superficial, more sceptical and less profound” (Charles & Lipovetsky 2005: 12-13)

So while the more classic narcissus of postmodernism represented hedonism and

rebellion, the hypernarcissus of today is also responsible, organised, effective and flexible.

(ibid.). Examples of this paradox might be the ever-increasing rate of consumption during growing ecological awareness, or the simultaneous focus on pleasure and health, or in other words, hedonism and control, at the same time. This paradoxical individuality also shows itself in fashion, and while individuals try to fulfil emotional needs and search for meaning, they are also very much concerned with self-image:

“On the one hand, the contemporary Narcissus is in search of interiority, authenticity, physic intimacy: on the other hand he tends to rehabilitate the spectacle of self, play and out-of-phase exhibitionism, the celebration of appearances”.

(Lipovetsky, 1994; 107)

This condition might explain why fashion consumers, while seeking meaning and personal pleasure, are also concerned about working conditions for clothes factory workers, or ecological production of clothing material

Seduced by novelty and epmemerality

The paragraph from Cabinet des Modes shows, that one of the most central conditions in fashion, which Lipovetsky applies to the hypermodern consumer, has been around for more centuries. The condition is the constant search for novelty, which gives the individual a feeling of pleasure. One of Lipovetsky’s main arguments is that consumers now consume for novelty and not for status.

“It certainly does not mean that there is no social logic of fashion, but that in fashion the controlling, determining factor is the headlong quest for novelty as such: not the cumbersome, deterministic mechanics of class conflict, but modern exaltation, the endless excitement of gratuitous aesthetic play”. (Lipovetsky, 1994; Kindle; location 634)

This condition is also supported by sociologist Yuniya Kawamura as she argues that:

“Verses on Novelty”

In a land where madness reigns One day Novelty appeared:

Immediately everyone rushed to her.

Everyone said that she was pretty

“Oh! Madame la Nouveauté, Stay in our country;

More than Intelligence, more than Beauty You will always be cherished here.”

“O.K”, the goddess responded to all the fools,

“Gentlemen, I will live here.”

And she promised to meet them The next day at the same time.

The next day came, she showed up As brilliant as the day before.

The first one to see her Cried, “God, she is old.

Cabinet des modes, 1758

“There are conditions for a fashion system to exist and operate…..change and novelty must be positively valued within the cultural group in question. If stability rather than change is highly valued, the rapid replacement of one form of dress for another, as fashion change implies, is unlikely to be perceived as desirable” (Kawamura, 2005; 49)

Psychologist René Köning furthermore argues in his fashion perception study, that fashion behaviour is naturally stimulated by curiosity, and that animals, including humans, are motivated by novelty and newness in general (Köning, 1973). This condition might explain why fashion consumers are keen on buying new clothes regularly, and why the consumption of clothes gives consumers a feeling of pleasure.

Search for pleasure

As an extension of novelty, hedonism – or the hyper-narcissistic individual – is another characteristic of the hypermodern fashion consumer. According to the emotional and hedonistic logic, everyone consume first and foremost for his or her own pleasure rather than out of rivalry with others. According to Lipovetsky, hyper-individualism can also be observed in fashion consumption:

“People live less and less according to systems of dominant ideas; like the rest, such systems have been swallowed up by frivolity. Higher goals do not disappear, but they do not longer stand out. Of course they are capable of mobilizing the masses on occasions, but indirectly and in unpredictable ways, like passing flare-ups that are quickly extinguished, replaced by the longer lasting quest for personal happiness.

(Lipovetsky, 1994; Kindle; location 3138)

Fear of the future – longing for the past

Hyper-modernity suggests a time orientation, which commands us to live responsibly in the moment - out of fear of what the future will bring. Societal development has brought fear and concern for future unpredictability among us as consumers, employees and individuals and forces us to live, think and act in the present, so we still can still reach life while the time is here. Lipovetsky states that:

"These days Narcissus is gnawed by anxiety; fear has imposed itself on his pleasures, and anguish on his liberation" (Charles & Lipovetsky, 2005: 13).

Ulrik Bech also argues that we today live in a risk society (Ulrich Beck, 2002), in a fear of unemployment, technological change, globalization, competition, pollution, violence, terror. We observe 20-year olds saving for pensions they cannot use until about 40 years from now - something that would have never happened in the postmodern era. Giddens also refers to this condition, arguing that individuals seek security in a changing world where globalization has taken hold (Giddens, 1996).

This condition might be one of the reasons why vintage fashion, such as the fashion style of the TV show “Mad Men” is so extremely popular and influential.

Democratic consumption

Lipvetsky argues that through history, the fashion system, and thereby also fashion consumption has become more democratic (Lipovetsky, 1994). In short, the democratization of fashion is understood as the process through history and until now, where the availability of fashionable clothing to more and more people has gradually increased in concurrence with mass production and more affordable prices. Also while tastes and trends in Haute Couture age was defined only by the designer of the greatest fashion houses, in the 1960’s and 70’s, it was youth-culture and subcultures which set the different popular looks of their times (Lipovetsky, 1994; 102-5)

Fashion's aesthetic and ephemeral signs no longer strike the lower classes as an inaccessible phenomenon reserved for others; they have become a mass demand, a life-style decor taken for granted in a society that holds change, pleasure, and novelty sacred

Democratization also refers to the increased power of the consumers, in the cases of customizing, blogging, re-selling and buying, and the DIY movement (Spencer, 2008). As seen in the picture below, it is not difficult to create the look of one of the most popular designers of 2010, Alexander Wang, at a much cheaper price. These are instruction given at a Danish fashion blog.

Source: www.fredesblog.dk

Consumption defining and empowering the self

This condition refers to the possibility of consumer to be able to consume all the new styles – across classes and ages. It also describes how consumption can support the construction and change of individual identity. Lipovetky states that:

The psychologizing of appearance is accompanied by the narcissistic pleasure of transforming oneself in one's own eyes and those of others, changing one's skin, feeling like-arid becoming-someone else, by changing the way one dresses. Women could look athletic in shorts or trousers, highfalutin in a cocktail dress, businesslike in a suit, naughty or vampish in an evening sheath; the modems seductiveness of haute couture sterns from the way it has managed to bring into coexistence of luxury and individuality, class and originality, personal identity and the ephemeral alteration of the self. At each season, what [women] are seeking is perhaps, even more than a dress, a renewal of their psychological makeup. Fashion has a role to play vis-a-vis women: it helps them to exist. It can even take the place of drugs! (Lipovetsky, 1994;

Kindle; location 276)

In this sense, while fashion consumption might be used for signaling identity outwards, it is also used for stabilise identity inwards.

Ethics and authenticity

Lipovetsky argues that while consumers are following a need for novelty and for personal pleasure, ethic and moral issues also guide the hypermodern individual (the paradoxical individuality). Consumers do not follow producers and advertisers blindly.

The ruse of fashion's irrationality does riot rule out human intelligence and free initiative, or society's responsibility for its own future. In the new democratic era, collective progress toward freedom of thought will not occur apart from seduction; it will be undergirded by the fashion form, but it will be seconded by other agencies, reinforced by other criteria: by the educational establishment, by the openness scrutiny and the ethical standards proper to the media, by theoretical and scientific works, and by the corrective system of laws and regulations (Lipovetsky, 1994; Kindle: location 218)

Lipovetsky furthermore states that we, in as sense, are in a time of ‘responsible individualism’; a second individualistic revolution, which is reflected in the principal customs of our society, in fashion and in our ethics (Lipovetsky, 1994 ). Lipovetsky emphasises that common social values still persist in our contemporarily society – but at the same time, paradoxically, our ethics have become trouble-free, situational, plural and emotional (Lipovetsky,1994 ). The American marketing scholar Douglas B. Holt, argues that consumers in the hypermodern era have grown increasingly sceptical of the postmodern marketing techniques, such as the use of irony or representation of hyper-realities (Holt, 2002). Consumers are in a search for authenticity, in the form of original brands, which can provide original and relevant cultural meaning, and thereby contribute to the process of identity creation (ibid.)

This dimension might explain why organic and fair-traded fashion has become a factor in the fashion industry (Hamnett, 2005), and while fashion brands constantly seek to incorporate the look of subcultures in their collections. (Qvortrup, 2003)

CONCLUSION

We have now established a characterisation of the hypermodern fashion consumer. In a process of self-realisation, the hypermodern consumer constructs and cultivates his identity through consumption. However, rather than consuming according status the hypermodern consumer consumes due to a seduction to novelty. The goal of life for this consumer has become individual and personal happiness, which is also achieved through consumption. However the hypermodern consumer furthermore has ethical concerns, and a concern for how authentic fashion brands appear. Finally the hypermodern consumer focuses on the present in fear of what the future might bring. Moreover the hypermodern consumer present several paradoxes, such as a need for pleasure/ ethical

concerns, fear of the future/ longing for the past, and happy/ unhappy.

We will next look into theories of taste, in order be able to determine how the taste of fashion consumers is constructed.