Magdalena Petersson McIntyre

This article examines how generative artificial intelligence (AI) design platforms are reshaping fashion and textile design by mediating creative processes, reconfiguring design roles and influencing aesthetic outcomes. While these design practices have traditionally relied on embodied techniques such as sketching or draping, AI platforms shift the creative process towards prompt-writing, thus transforming the designer’s role into one of linguistic precision. These systems not only facilitate design but also condition imaginaries, authorship and aesthetic norms. Drawing on an AI-augmented walkthrough methodology, we analyse four platforms through two themes: what we term the ‘limits of democratization’ and the ‘myth of the muse’. We show how platforms position themselves as accessible and inspirational while at the same time depending on opaque infrastructures, embedding aesthetic biases and upholding technical gatekeeping. Claims to democratization often obscure the need for professional knowledge and prompt fluency and overlook how defaults marginalize certain bodies, identities and styles. At the same time, the framing of AI as a muse conceals the constrained, algorithmically structured nature of digital creativity. Drawing on theories of ‘cultural infrastructure’, ‘distributed agency’ and ‘market agencements’, we examine how interface design, algorithmic suggestions and user scripts configure what can be created, who is positioned as a designer, and how creative practice is recognized and valued within fashion design culture. These dynamics show that AI design platforms do not simply mediate creativity; they reconfigure design practices and redistribute creative agency. Rather than serving as neutral tools, they function as socio-technical systems embedded in cultural and commercial infrastructures. By offering a critical, design-led perspective, this article contributes to understanding how generative AI reshapes the conditions under which fashion is imagined, produced and valued, thereby advancing emerging debates on AI and creativity in fashion.

Feminism has become a recurrent ingredient in many women's narratives of their selves and is regularly appearing as an important aspect of women's success, happiness and self‐realization. The development has been criticized for upholding a view in which structural inequalities are explained in terms of individual choices; choice feminism. This article examines two professional groups, lifestyle influencers and gender equality consultants. The purpose is to examine how questions of feminism, choice and entrepreneurship are made sense of in these contexts. The article situates the interviewees' explanations in fourth, or even fifth wave feminism to examine whether the embrace of choice still relies on a critique of gender structures and inequalities. Both the consultants and the influencers felt that entrepreneurial success had changed the way society viewed them. The appeal of ‘choice’ was an outcome of a perceived lack of choice, a matter of performing resistance to the culturally defined choices these individuals felt were presented to them. The article contributes to an understanding of the shifting meanings and forms feminism takes in social media and commercial market settings and what it is that these individuals find appealing in addressing individual success as a feminist victory.

Consumers are increasingly asked to “empty out their closets,” to “de-clutter” or in other ways detach themselves from the textile surplus of their wardrobes. In this article, fashion is examined as a process of detachment. Building on ethnographic wardrobe interviews, wardrobe clearances and group discussions with consumers, detachment is viewed as a fundamental, yet underexamined, process of fashion practices. Drawing on the queer phenomenology of Sarah Ahmed, we observe how the informants express a desire to detach themselves from the fast fashion system and become more sustainable, less dependent on consumption and more oriented toward emotional investment. Being oriented towards specific pieces of clothing allowed for attachment to that which is already here thus opening up for a relationship with clothing based on joy and care, rather than the unsustainable focus on the newly produced.

This special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy focuses on the digitalization of consumption and its social, cultural, ethical, political, and gendered implications. It thus answers the call for more research on how digital devices spread from the purely personal domain to multiple sociocultural domains. Through their use, new cultural practices have emerged between consumers and these devices, and devices and markets, that lead to change, in terms of consumer demand, consumption norms, and issues of ethics, culture, and power. Closely examining the role that devices play in consumption behavior enables us to address the supposed manipulative power of hi-tech companies, infrastructures, and systems at the global level, and the view ordinary market actors hold of digital appliances as empowering tools at the local level. The papers in this volume bridge ‘actor network theory' and ‘consumer culture theory' from the perspective of market ‘agencements.’ Ruckenstein-Granroth and Beauvisage-Mellet, and Arriagada-Concha focus on the device-mediated relationship between large digital market infrastructures and consumer behavior; Petersson McIntyre and Licoppe unveil the societal and cultural underpinnings of digitalized markets. Last but not least, Sörum and Soujtis address the political dimensions and implications of our new digital consumer equipment and society.

As the world changes, so do perceptions of luxury. Consequently, the luxury industry’s efforts to capture the consumer’s imagination also change. Traditionally, the visual language that is used to market perfumes builds on a heterosexual logic; by objectifying and subordinating the feminine subject and portraying ‘her’ as desirable to an internalized male gaze. However, if you want the best money can buy, why would you subject yourself to such subordination? To deal with this seeming paradox, the marketing of luxury perfumes has, in the last decade, increasingly portrayed gender identity as something fluid. A new discerning consumer has emerged; a customer who is not constrained to making conventional product choices that are based on price and quality. More and more diverse concepts of ‘consumer types’ and ‘identities’ have emerged, where notions of gender rigidity are challenged, by blending and blurring the categories of masculine, feminine, unisex and androgynous. According to many perfume brands, consumers are now free to choose and rise above (and even break free from) the stereotypes previously represented by the industry. This article presents the argument that that these shifting representations of gender should be interpreted as ways of enacting luxury, congruent with definitions of luxury as ‘emotional’ and ‘self-pleasure’, instead of indicative of a real change in the luxury industry’s view on gender identity. Gender fluidity is only presented as ‘luxury for women’, thereby indicating that freedom from structures is qualified as luxury for women. Therefore, the marketing representations employed in the perfume industry express a commodification of gender fluidity rather than the dissolution of gender categories.

Social media is abound with women writing about consumption goods and practices associated with femininity and heterosexual nuclear family life, such as being married, dressing, cooking and home decoration. This article examines how the housewife ideal can be an attractive identity in the 2010s and, drawing on the post-humanist performativity by Karen Barad (2007), it maps the material-discursive agencies that enable the re-emergence of this figure. Building on in-depth interviews with women who refer to themselves as influencers and bloggers, and visual and textual analyses of their Instagram-accounts, including links to sponsors and comments from followers, the article analyzes how the tensions between these women's real lives and their cyber lives, become meaningful in this technological culture. The breaking of boundaries between human and non-human resulting from digital technology has re-configured the housewife role by transforming boundaries between intimate and commercial practices. By focusing on the three areas: Transforming the feminine body, Transforming Intimacy, and Entrepreneurial femininity the article shows how agency emerges from within transforming practices of body, intimacy and entrepreneurship, intra-acting within this new housewife phenomenon. In doing so it discusses the negotiations and space for agency these women thought that digital technologies provided for them.

Mass-produced consumer packages are everyday objects that almost go unnoticed. However, by claiming things such as the essence of femininity or masculinity, they affect us and are co-creators of our reality. Based on visual ethnography, this article traces the representation of gender on mass-produced packaging during a time when male privilege is being challenged and female visual objectification is being questioned. The chosen products all have an intimate relationship with body care and the body’s functions. On some of the packaging, the biological differences between women and men are presented as scientific facts. On other examples, such as perfume packaging, gender is represented as decoupled from the body and part of an enjoyable choice of identity, as multiple, fragmented, and fluid. Such representations conceal power differences by making gender into a matter of consumer choice, while also illustrating the constantly changing nature of gender. Gender and package design are entangled processes that affect and change with each other.

What does it mean to love one's job? This article argues that for an understanding of power and agency in the labour market, particularly in the service and retail industry, passion needs to be given more consideration. Building on ethnographic observations and interviews with sales assistants and store managers within fashion retailing, the reasons for employees to perform ‘aesthetic labour’ are examined. Aesthetic labour generally refers to work practices in which workers are expected to conform to particular corporate aesthetics, management ideals or brand identities. The article argues that embodied work practices must be related to workers’ own motivations. The purpose is to examine why so many people working as sales staff in the field of fashion retail claim to ‘love’ their work and why ‘passion’ is considered so important? The findings of this work are that employees are driven by emotions and affects and that aesthetic labour relies on ‘the commodification of passion’. Workers dressed and talked the way they did because they identified affectively with the self-organizing principles of these retail fields. Passion made sense to the interviewees because it gave meaning to being a working subject on the neo-liberal labour market.