Body Projects: Fashion, Aesthetic Modifications and Stylized Selves

Consumer capitalist societies have been described as inviting individuals to joyfully take responsibility for their bodies and to invest in body maintenance and enhancement in order to perform culturally appropriate self-presentation. The body is said to become the “visible carrier of the self” in contemporary “consumer culture” (Featherstone 1982), the finest consumer object subject to endless triumphant, commercially mediated “rediscovery (Baudrillard 1998). Fitness culture, for example, has been described as the epitome of such trend in consumer capitalism, spreading all over the global West (Sassatelli 2015). All in all, a variety of products and services indeed give evidence to the increasing process of performative, aestheticized rationalization of the body, whereby individualization is coupled with standardization, self-surveillance with spectacularization, discipline with hedonism (Sassatelli 2012). Via commercial aestheticization, especially the surface of our bodies is endlessly celebrated or stigmatized as iconic representation of selves. In this chapter, we will focus on three arenas of body surface modification techniques which, as opposed to physical activity, are relatively instantaneous: fashion, body art and cosmetic surgery. Differently placed on the body modification spectrum in terms of physical risks, permanence, and invasiveness, fashion, body art and cosmetic surgery allow to reflect on the dominant cultural framing of bodies and selves in contemporary consumer culture, putting the structuration of consumers’ experience of embodied subjectivity under critical lens.