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 physical self-fashioning mediated through
affect and the body 1

. 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.