Abstract
The previous chapter explored the representation of an anxious social subject and a related suspicion of the veracity of the social world in a range of contemporary cinematic texts, centered on a set of French-language films from 1995–2005. This chapter will examine a slightly more recent cultural phenomenon, one linked to virtual media venues, including video-sharing sites as well as blogs and other platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr, that provides an intriguing complement to the more elaborated fictions of feature-length cinema. This is the culture of the fashion blog and the corollary vlog (video blog) and more specifically the common practice of featuring an outfit of the day (OOTD) regularly, sometimes daily, within this culture. The OOTD is examined here as a symptom of the sorts of anxieties presented in the cinematic texts but also as a kind of protest against disappearance through an automatic recourse to the backstage, reversing the ordering of regions in classical dramaturgical sociology yet at the same time assuring a gap remains between the performing agent and the fantasy of an unbarred, unmutilated subject. This case study will thus take the empirical exploration further into questions of virtual technology and especially social media platforms, as well as the particular role of fashion in processes of self-formation and performance.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 Steve Bailey
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bailey, S. (2016). Protesting Disappearance: The Drama of the Stylish Self in the World of OOTD. In: Performance Anxiety in Media Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137557896_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137557896_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56853-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-55789-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)