Deep Mediatisation and the Datafication of Fashion

Mediatisation has established itself as a significant notion for understanding contemporary social processes. It is a “sensitizing concept” that helps researchers interrogate the intensification of the influence of media tech- nologies and institutions on various social spheres (Jansson, 2015, pp. 14– 15; Hepp, 2020, p. 9). A meta- process, it “points to the changed dynamics and dimensionality of the (whole) social world in a media age” whereby the media increasingly mould practices and experiences (Couldry, 2014a, p. 231; Krotz, 2007; Hepp, 2013).

However, contexts of mediatisation need to be fully qualified to account for its dimension as a differentiated and historically situated process that is “domain specific” (Hepp and Hasebrink, 2018, p. 23; Landerer, 2013; Strömbäck and Dimitrova, 2014). The Bourdieuian notion of field allows for this qualifying and contextualising. In this conceptual chapter, I focus on the field of fashion, also concentrating on digital media the better to inter- rogate the differentiated nature of mediatisation (sections I and II). In doing so, I bring Bourdieu’s field theory in dialogue with mediatisation theory, contributing to the small body of work that has started drawing conceptual links between the two theories. I do so through the notion of logic, turning, in particular, towards the recent literature on deep mediatisation as a new stage of mediatisation (sections I and II).

At the core of deep mediatisation is datafication, the process whereby everyday practices and experiences are increasingly turned into data. Drawing on critical data studies scholarship, a body of research that gen- erally fails to engage with mediatisation theory, I explore manifestations of the datafication of fashion, and discuss datafication as a key logic of the field of fashion (section III). In dialogue with Bourdieu’s conceptual frame- work, I reflect on the role of data as capital and on that of algorithms as key players and gatekeepers of the field of fashion (section III).