Title:
A DISCUSSION OF STREETWEAR FASHION AS A CULT: A QUALITATIVE APPROACH

Authors:
Hiroko Oe ,UK

Abstract:
Clothing continues to be a symbolic consumer product with layers of meaning. Fashion has taken on social, cultural, and religious meanings. This study focuses on the new wave of streetwear as seen by millennials and uses fashion brands as cults and Goffman's theory of the internal and external self as a basis for analysis, with the aim of furthering the critical discussion of fashion. Qualitative methods were used in the analysis. First, key themes were identified from information posted on Twitter about streetwear, and based on this information, interviews with 18 participants were conducted, and thematic analysis was applied to the text data to visualize the connotations and values of street fashion in the consumer's consciousness. Text mining software, KH Coder, was used for the analysis. The results revealed that streetwear shoppers perceive streetwear as a tool to strengthen ties between shoppers of the same brand and as a cult value that encourages commitment to a particular brand. Streetwear shoppers, on the other hand, perceive the impact of wearing a particular brand of streetwear fashion as a communication tool that demonstrates their internal beliefs and ideas. And this study found that in the consciousness of street fashion-wearing millennials, they understand the concept proposed by Goffman's theory of dramaturgy, the consciousness of "getting on stage and performing," as a metaphor for wearing street fashion. To the theme of "fashion cults," which has already been established as one of the debates in fashion research, we propose an agenda for discussion that further extends Goffman's dramaturgy, provided by sociology, to shed light on the perspectives and behaviours of contemporary consumers, which will be useful for future discussions in the field of research.