On the Style Site: Face Hunter as Node and Prism
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This chapter’s point of departure is the thesis Producing Scarcity: An Investigation of the Retro Market (2004), which analysed one of the dominant trends during the past twenty years: retro. More specifically, the study concerned the construction of transnational symbolic value attached to material culture by aesthetically influential social groups, applying a theoretical approach based on anthropological consumption theory. The thesis invited further investigation of the social production of scarcity via ‘style communities,’ where exclusive style (in the sense ‘for the few’) functions as an identification mechanism. One way of pursuing this is to analyse street-style weblogs such as Face Hunter <http://facehunter.blogspot.com/>, which presents a slightly ‘alternative’ image. Such blogs contribute to the construction of transnational (imagined) communities via mediated photographic representations of social groups with symbolic power and their ‘personal style.’ The blogs show photographs of people and how they are dressed around the world, mostly pictured outside on the street, often at openings and social events. The blogs are continuously updated, and linked together. The study of (mediated) style further incorporates an active role of appropriating and interpreting culture (parallel to Nicolas Bourriaud’s (1998/2002) term ‘semionauts’), and touches upon distinctive strategies as well as relations between counter culture (as imagined) and the commercial sphere. The chapter modestly pursues Mary Douglas’ ambition – claiming the anthropologists’ right to study style without accusations of reductionism.