Branding daily life: Fashion influencers as market actors in the social media economy

Fashion bloggers, Instagrammers, YouTubers, and beauty vloggers have been described under the term “influencers” - micro-celebrities who accumulate followers on social media and promote themselves and the brands and products that hire them. Influencers qua micro-celebrities manage and commodify their images, personas, and content in order to construct affective relationships with their audiences. They do this in the form of “glamour labor, " i.e., constant online self-promotion and self-fashioning mediated through affect and the body. In spite of their growing presence, little attention has been paid to the cultural and technical knowledge influencers develop to create meaningful content around brands and products. Drawing on interviews with Chilean social media influencers in the field of fashion (N: 35), and visual and textual analysis of a sample of 90 Instagram stories, this chapter analyzes how influencers’ calculations - economic and cultural - commodify their knowledge to support brands and themselves. This analysis reflects on how influencers experience the commercialization of their knowledge through digital platforms in the social media economy.