Fashion Film and OBC (Online Brand Community): The Co-authoring Dynamics

Abstract

The aim of this research project is to investigate how fashion brands and their online communities begin a co-authoring process in fashion films. Since the early days, fashion market has always enriched its dreamlike imageries with garments and images [1], with the advent of internet, those dressed bodies could move, tell stories and spur deeper engagement. In fact, fashion films are the direct digital evolution of the static fashion magazine images. Transposed on the web, such images can now reach online brand communities who often start a debate on both the fashion film and the brand, thus nurturing the brand contents. This results in a typical communicative flow that we can commonly observe on social media, which has also been object of study by some academics [2–4]. However, the dynamics and inferences produced are not fully clear: the OBCs are often similar to black holes. In order to gain more clarity on the topic, this study compares different types of fashion film with OBCs profiles. The final goal is to outline several classes of engagement and verify the contribution this process has in generating (cultural) contents.