IN OR OUT? HOW CONSUMER PERFORMANCES LEAD TO THE EMERGENCE OF NEW TASTES

While institutional authorities like fashion designers and media are well-documented as drivers of aesthetic taste, the role of consumers themselves in creating these tastes remains under-theorized. This study investigates how networked consumers, through their own interactions and negotiations, actively shape the emergence of new taste regimes—normative systems that organize the aesthetics of a practice by linking objects, doings, and meanings.

The authors conducted a longitudinal study of the "goth ninja" fashion movement, which emerged in the mid-2000s. Using netnography, they analyzed 35 months of activity on the online forum stylezeitgeist, examining over 170,000 posts and conducting semi-structured interviews with participants. This approach allowed the researchers to observe how a community of consumers, largely independent of institutional fashion authorities, iteratively built a cohesive aesthetic.

The study identifies three consumer-led micro-processes that drive the formation of a taste regime:

1. Taste Regime Convergence: Consumers actively narrow the aesthetic field by ruling out objects or behaviors they deem inconsistent with their collective identity, often by associating them with disparaged meanings like "commercialism."
2. Taste Regime Extension: To prevent stagnation, consumers introduce new objects or practices that align with the group's core values, such as somberness or craftsmanship, thereby expanding the aesthetic possibilities.
3. Taste Regime Normalization: Through ongoing feedback, such as "What Are You Wearing Today" threads, the community stabilizes the links between objects, doings, and meanings, eventually establishing a recognizable "uniform" that defines the taste.

These processes demonstrate that consumers do not merely consume pre-existing trends; they act as architects of taste, creating discursive systems that eventually influence the broader fashion field.

This research shifts the focus from institutional "top-down" fashion cycles to the "bottom-up" agency of consumer collectives. It highlights that even in the absence of traditional authorities, consumers are capable of creating complex, normative structures that govern aesthetic legitimacy. This provides a framework for understanding how niche online communities can evolve into influential cultural trends.