Mobile Fashion Applications: a Sociological Perspective

The aim of this research is to explore how the fashion system has been reshaped by mobile fashion applications. Much research has been carried out on many aspects of the fashion system at the interface with web 2.0, such as fashion e-commerce, fashion blogging, and so on. However, so far no study has illustrated the dynamics of the fashion system through the lens of fashion applications. In my research, I explore the role that fashion applications play in the current fashion system both in Western countries and in China. Mobile Internet applications generally nourish the discourse fashion bloggers and communities of interest in fashion elaborate for expressing their own points of view on fashion at various levels. Inspired by Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour 2005) and domestication theory (Silverstone 1996), this study focuses on the new possibilities mobile Internet provides to support the adoption of fashion products. Compared with the univocal manner in which traditional media have presented and explained new fashion designs to the public, mobile Internet introduces diverse approaches which enable people to understand fashion, adapt abstract fashion proposals to their needs, and communicate about fashion with other users as well as with the fashion system (Nie 2013). Moreover, mobile phones share some attributes with the Internet, such as easy accessibility, interactivity, and potential networking, which are very suitable to respond to the needs of grassroots users. Before presenting my analysis, and given the fact that my research objective is at the intersection of several complex fields of study, I delineate these fields of research showing at which point the debate has developed them. In the first part, in order to gain a more complete understanding of the world of fashion on the smartphone, it is necessary to contextualize the background. And then in my thesis, I introduce the results of my research, and in the last part I illustrate the discussions and final remarks.