Authenticity in Discursive Practices of the Online Market for Second-Hand Luxury Clothing

Authors

Ronan L. Zampier, Federal University of Viçosa, BrazilFollow
Rita de Cássia P. Farias, Federal University of Viçosa, BrazilFollow
Marcelo R. Pinto, Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, BrazilFollow

Abstract

Authenticity is a particularly sensitive and salient issue in the online market for second-hand luxury clothing, and it is still little explored in the field of consumption studies. In this study we sought to analyze how authenticity is represented in discursive practices of the Brazilian online market for second-hand luxury clothing. The corpus of the work consisted of data collected through interviews in five stores of the Brazilian online market of luxury second-hand clothing. The data were analyzed using the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), proposed by Fairclough (1992), articulated to the sociocultural perspective of consumption. From the discursive categories Subject, Interdiscursivity, Intertextuality, Transitivity System, and Appraisal System, we perceived that the process of legitimizing the stores and the representations of authenticity are overlapped and traversed significantly by historical, social, and cultural aspects. We conclude that insofar as it becomes difficult to ensure objective authenticity, an interpretative dimension emerges, elaborated from the influence of sociocultural factors that underlie the judgment on what is authentic luxury, which in the scenario investigated are indexes of expression of high luxury. In this case, the origins and trajectories that are recognized as references of elite distinction for Brazilian consumers are important elements for the interpretation of authenticity.

Keywords

Authenticity, Luxury Clothing, Second-Hand Consumption, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Brazilian Consumer

Author Bio(s)

Ronan Leandro Zampier, DSc, completed his doctorate from the Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil. He is currently Professor at the Minas Gerais State University. His research interests are Culture and Consumption, Luxury, Consumer Studies with emphasis on intersectionality (including variables: Class, Gender, Race / Ethnicity and Age) and Marketing and Society. Correspondence regarding this article can be addressed directly to: rlzampier@hotmail.com.

Rita de Cássia Pereira Farias, DSc, is an associate professor in the Department of Home Economics and Graduate Program in Home Economics at Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil. Her research interests are corporeality, culture, identity and consumption, from the perspective of anthropology.

Marcelo de Rezende Pinto, DSc, is a Professor of the Graduate Program in Administration of the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. His research interests are Culture and Consumption, Consumer Studies with emphasis on intersectionality (including the variables gender, race and class), Transformative Consumer Research, Marketing and Society and Interpretative methods of marketing research.

Acknowledgements

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.

Publication Date

12-21-2019

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2019.3945

Recommended APA Citation

Zampier, R. L., Farias, R. P., & Pinto, M. R. (2019). Authenticity in Discursive Practices of the Online Market for Second-Hand Luxury Clothing. The Qualitative Report, 24(12), 3125-3149. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2019.3945