Communicative value chains: Fashion bloggers and branding agencies as cultural intermediaries

Contrary to traditional forms of professional journalism, where events must be accounted for and reported without personal bias, fashion blogging shares some practices with a consumer oriented form of lifestyle journalism. Fashion bloggers are promoting an ‘authentic’ and ‘personal’ lifestyle based on the consumption of goods, while valuing ideas of autonomy also present in journalism. One of the key aspects of fashion blogging is how bloggers display a set of strategies to promote themselves both as brands and with brands. For instance, they stage and promote a ‘glamorous life’, sharing images of activities like shopping and travelling. However, they do not do this by themselves; they are part of a network of economic and social relations linking different actors, e.g. branding agencies, audiences and platforms. Drawing from a series of semi-structured interviews with a group of Chilean fashion bloggers (N = 35), in this chapter we discuss how fashion bloggers become cultural intermediaries shaping consumers’ decisions by working with other intermediaries, specifically branding agencies. In this process, these intermediaries are part of ‘communicative value chains’, in order to create ‘branded content’ and consumption experiences around brands and products on digital platforms.