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The study aims to contribute to the knowledge on the role of the fashion bloggers in the product adoption process in both advanced and emerging markets. Specifically, the study investigates the impact of credibility, engagement and homophily on intentions to buy fashion products recommended by the blogger.

The empirical research builds on an online survey with a sample of 402 consumers (189 Italian and 213 Taiwanese). The proposed model was tested through structural equation modeling.

Results showed that homophily and the fashion blogger credibility positively influenced the engagement within the blog. Moreover, perceived similarity with the other blog's followers (homophily) and a higher engagement with the blog both translated in a stronger intention to buy the sponsored products and to spread a positive word-of-mouth about the fashion blogger.

The study has practical implications since it identifies strategic suggestions for both companies that create partnerships with famous fashion bloggers and bloggers who have turned their diary-style websites into a business.

The study contributes to a better understanding of the influence exerted by blog engagement on intentions to follow blogger's recommendations. The study also examines credibility and homophily as antecedents of engagement, which have not been extensively researched in the past with respect to blogs.

In the past few years fashion blogs have become a popular form of user‐generated content, and consequently, the fashion industry has shown great interest in fashion blog marketing. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze consumer‐to‐consumer (C2C) electronic word‐of‐mouth (eWOM) in fashion blogs, and especially to compare naturally‐occurring, i.e. organic eWOM with marketer‐influenced, i.e. amplified eWOM.

The study takes a netnographic approach to the phenomenon of fashion blogs. The empirical material consists of observational data including blog texts and audience comments of six popular fashion blogs in Finland.

Findings indicate that although not as varied as organic, amplified eWOM content in consumer fashion blogs resembles organic content. The main topics discussed in organic eWOM include personal style, brands, designers and retailers, tips and advice as well as purchases. Amplified topics concerned products received by the blogger, brands, designers and retailers, tips given to the audience, and competitions.

The findings indicate that for blog marketing to be effective and credible, the marketed fashion items, designers, or retailers need to fit the blogger's personal style.

Social media, especially blogs, play an important role in contemporary fashion marketing. This study addresses the emerging, yet scarce area of research into how marketer influence on fashion bloggers can be seen in user‐generated content.

The purpose of this study is to draw on an inductive approach in exploring how the post-90s generation relates themselves with the others when browsing fashion images on social media. More specifically, this work explores how young fashion readers perceive the phenomenon of bloggers' self-modeling as a means of self-expression.

Eight focus groups were conducted for 64 Hong Kong young fashion readers. Respondents were asked about their opinion on the fashion blogs, their preference toward bloggers' self-modeling phenomenon, and how they compare themselves with the self-modeling fashion bloggers.

Results indicate that a tendency of social comparison occurred as readers indicated preference toward fashion bloggers who perform as self-modeling image producers, this supports the notion of social comparison that human nature tends to compare with others similar to themselves. This finding also suggests the critical awareness of young fashion readers, in which an ideal beauty is perceived as a successful result from a calculated visual creation, namely “the creative self”.

This study focus on a Hong Kong setting with Instagram as the key communication platform; future research would be benefited from a wider scope of study from an international perspective.

This paper provides practical insight for fashion brands' strategic planners on how the fashion blogging works as a new genre of fashion communication. By understanding the fashion readers' preference, strategic planners could develop appropriate marketing communication strategy in response to the new trend of readers engaging in visual creative production for fashion.

This study reveals a new perspective in interpreting social comparison behavior for the fashion readers in the digital culture, whereas the targeted comparison attribute changed from ideal beauty to the creative self. This finding contributes to the discourse of academic theories in social media, social comparison and fashion communication.

This study aims to explore passionate labour in the fashion blogosphere and addresses two research questions: How does passion animate passionate labour? How does the emotion of passions and the discipline of labour fuse within passionate labour?

This study presents a three-year netnographic fieldwork of replikate fashion blogger-preneurs. Data are based on in-depth interviews, blogs, social media posts and informed by the relationships developed across these platforms.

Throughout the findings, this study unpacks the “little passions” that animate the passionate labour of blogger-preneurs. Passions include: passion for performing the royal lifestyle, the mobilisation of passion within strategic sociality and transformation and self-renewal through blogging. Lastly, the cycle of passion illustrates how passions can be recycled into new passionate projects.

This study offers insight on how passionate labour requires the negotiation and mobilisation of emotion alongside a calculated understanding of market logics.

This study raises implications for aspiring blogger-preneurs, luxury brand managers and organisations beyond the blogging context.

The contribution of this study lies in the cultural understanding of passion as a form of labour where passion has become a way of life. The theorisation of passionate labour contributes to existing research in three ways. First, this study identifies social mimesis as a driver of passionate labour and its links to class distinction. Second, it offers insight on how passionate labour requires the negotiation and mobilisation of emotion alongside a calculated understanding of market logics. Third, it advances critical debate around exploitation and inequality within digital labour by demonstrating how passion is unequally distributed.

By using the concept of style, the purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the notion of brand community. More specifically, it seeks to explore how style can function as a linking value in forms of communities centred on brands that emerge within the empirical context of fashion and social media.

A netnography of the content produced by 18 fashion bloggers in Sweden was conducted. Content analysis of this material was used to map how consumption objects, in terms of fashion brands, were integrated in activities taking place on blogs, and through these processes, acted as a linking value for community members.

– This paper demonstrates how fashion bloggers, together with their readers, constitute a form of community centred on style. It also shows how fashion bloggers, by combining and assembling fashion brands and products, articulate and express different style sets, and how they, together with their followers, engage in activities connected to these style ideals.

– As this study has been empirically limited to a Swedish setting, future research would benefit from findings of international expressions of communities of style.

Based on this study, strategies for managing communities of style is suggested to represent a potential source of competitive advantage for fashion firms.

In the context of the conceptual discussion about what brings members of communities together, this study provides evidence of how style can function as a linking value in the setting of consumer communities that emerge within the boundaries of fashion and social media.

Purpose – The purpose of our study was to better understand how bloggers organize branded storytelling in fashion and luxury blogs using explicit and implicit self-brand association.

Methodology/approach – We have carried out a Netnography on a sample of 60 fashion and luxury blogs. Data analysis relied on a visual denotational and connotational analysis. We have also conducted hermeneutic interviews of influential fashion bloggers and readers to validate our findings.

Findings – Bloggers differently combine explicit and implicit textual and visual branded stimuli depending on their character types. The most influential blogs combine textual implicitness and visual explicitness, regardless of their character types. Other influential bloggers combine visual and textual elements of the story more or less explicitly depending on the archetypes they have constructed. Bloggers reintermediate the relationship between brands and consumers and serve as a “lens” through which readers may select a brand and decide on purchase. The quality of the relationship between the bloggers and the readers relies on the initial reading contract, the evolving presence of the advertised brands in the blog's content, and the amount of privacy shared by the bloggers with their audience.

Research limitations/implications – Our sample is very limited and includes very influential and professionalized blogs.

Practical implications – Our study should help brand managers in selecting fashion blogs as a new relay for advertisement or sponsored content.

Originality/value of paper – Our study provides a framework to brand managers by highlighting recognizable storytelling patterns.

This paper focuses on the analysis of fashion blog activity regarding brands under corporate crisis situations and discusses how these opinion leaders may be agents of corporate crisis management.

The authors analyzed four influential Portuguese fashion blogs regarding eight fashion brands that had experienced a corporate crisis situation. In total, five of the selected brands were mentioned in 2.846 posts of blog content, whose discourse was deeply analyzed.

The absence of express reference to brand crisis suggests that fashion bloggers tend to ignore these crisis events or divert the readers' attention to the brands' more positive aspects. This result opens the discussion whether fashion bloggers downplay corporate crisis in brand equity or whether it expresses strategies of brand crisis communication through digital influencers.

Though social media may be a source of negative word-of-mouth, social media influencers have been considered important partners of corporate crisis communication in particularly challenging times. Many studies have focused on the role of social media influencers in crisis management, but there was a dearth of research on the specific case of blogs. This study contributes to the understanding of fashion bloggers as agents of brand communication, particularly regarding crisis management and their role on brand activation and positive electronic word-of-mouth, even under crisis situations. This contribution paves the way for future research on whether this is a spontaneous phenomenon or the reflection of possible partnerships between companies and fashion bloggers for the management of corporate crisis situations in the context of fashion brands.

This study aims to examine the influence of fashion blogs on consumer brand preferences and investigate the emergence of “communities of style” associated with combinations of fashion brands.

This study undertakes a netnography of Swedish fashion blogs, applying an ethnographic approach to information posted on the Internet.

Right now, there are probably more people in Sweden reading or posting on a fashion blog than there are reading a newspaper. There were greater than 60 Swedish fashion blogs generating greater than 10,000 visits a week back in August 2009; ten of them each generated greater than 100,000 visits a week. It is an increasingly global phenomenon – the location of choice for internationally known elite fashion bloggers. This is a consumer-driven information platform publicizing the brand choices made by stylish people to an international audience – a development with considerable implications for fashion industry marketers.

This study focuses on the Swedish blog network. Future research could use a similar netnographic approach to identify international communities of style and relate them to the global fashion industry.

The study draws attention to the way this development shifts power over brand meaning toward consumers and away from marketers.

The study shows that fashion blogs can demonstrate all the characteristics of a community and can communicate with and influence a wide audience.

The study highlights the use of style as a way to bring consumers together in virtual communities involving the selection and combination of multiple brands.

Using the theory of planned behavior, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between different types of media and the intention to buy sustainable apparel and test whether attitudes, social norms, and self-efficacy beliefs may explain these relationships.

A cross-sectional survey study was conducted among 681 young adults (18-26 years old).

Exposure to social media content of sustainable organizations, eco-activists, and sustainable apparel brands, and social media content of fashion bloggers and fast fashion brands predicted respondents’ attitudes, descriptive and subjective norms, and self-efficacy beliefs regarding buying sustainable apparel. In turn, attitudes, descriptive norms, and self-efficacy beliefs predicted the intention to buy sustainable apparel. Fashion magazines predicted the intention through self-efficacy. Specialized magazines did not predict the intention to buy sustainable apparel.

Results should be generalized with caution as the current study relied on a convenience sample of young adults. The cross-sectional study design limits the ability to draw conclusions regarding causality. Actual behavior was not addressed and needs to be included in further research.

The present study hints at the importance of social media to affect young consumers’ intentions to buy sustainable apparel. Sustainable apparel brands should consider attracting more young social media users to their social media pages.

This study is one of the first to examine the potential of different media to promote sustainable apparel buying intention.

A phenomenon that has revolutionized society is the technological millennial approach to communication. Social media has matured into a prime channel for regular interactions and development of brand–customer relationships that enrich a social identity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how this affects business communications.

The study utilized a social constructivist perspective, adopting an inductive and embedded case study strategy.

Drawing on the social identity theory, this paper examines how evolving social media platforms have impacted on brand perceptions in the fashion apparel and accessories industries. Fashion brands’ online presence provide a platform for customers to supplement social identity based on associations with brands, and ultimately this can shape brand perceptions among customers through promised functional and symbolic benefits.

The paper investigates a specialized marketing activity in the UK. A broader internationally based study would add strength to these findings.

The paper focuses on theoretical and managerial implications and proffers significant roles that social media and identity may play in keeping up with the design and development of marketing communications programs.

Multinational corporations have embraced internet technologies and social media in adopting platforms that their brands can use to contribute content to followers.

In total, 30 potential participants, drawn from diverse backgrounds, were contacted via social networking sites, e-mails and telephone. In total, 22 agreed to participate and their mean age was 26. An open-ended questionnaire allowed for elaboration, providing appropriate responses for a second interviewing phase. Four industry professionals were recruited through the researchers’ personal networks to participate in in-depth interviews that sought to investigate the significance of social media as a marketing tool from an industry perspective.