Fashion as Leisure: Experience and Entertainment Through Brands’ Digital Narratives

The fashion industry has spread through the media, via multiple fields, in order to strengthen its links to its consumers and to the public. Digital media is rich in content and able to transform fashion brands’ image in both a symbolic and pragmatic way. Digital communication and narratives are no longer conceived as a promotional strategy but as a part of the fashion industry’s requalification process. The development of multimodal digital apps and platforms bestows a new perspective of designing ways of living upon the industry, through mediation and coverage. Powerful brands and groups promote creativity as being part and parcel of the media industry, wherein fashion becomes a leisure-form based on plural phantasmagoria. This chapter points out how luxury fashion brands produce leisure mediation by occupying popular and high culture through digital narratives: video games created for apps (Gucci App), literature and dance podcasts (Chanel), and YouTube channels retracing the making of a collection, a show’s or an advertising campaign’s process (Christian Dior’s YouTube). This chapter’s issue reckons with the way mediation contributes to the industry’s requalification through three steps: the first step is about giving access to entertaining experiences related to fashion, its creativity, and its interconnection to culture; the second step is related to a global narrative apparatus which offers fashion brands hyper and multimodal visibility; the third step allows constant contact with the industry by creating leisure content which builds social links with the public and consumers.