Fashion Consumption, Celebrity Effects and Audience Reception Analysis

Media in Taiwan has undergone an innovative and immense development, boosting all kinds of available accesses for audience to reach. Despite newspaper and TV channels, audience can get whatever they want on the extentionless Internet. Surrounded by various kinds of resources of media and news which contain different purposes, audience’s consumption styles nowadays have been deeply affected and hugely differed from that in the past.
Through reporting celebrities’ lives and what they use, media constructs an atmosphere of aesthetics and audience’s fantasy for the high-level life. At the same time, receiving the messages on the media, the audience performs their own life style on the basis of individual experience or viewpoints on fashion and celebrities’ lives. Consequently, with the assistance of all kinds of media, news combining with the target of celebrities often promotes upsurges that can’t be easily oppressed and forms on-changing phenomena of news consumption.
News about brands endorsed by celebrities easily attracts audience’s quick doubts that they are actually commercials rather than news reports. From the literature review, through the penetration of media reports, the power represented by the celebrities is pervasive and profound. And this kind of news reports can easily blur and confound audience’s knowledge and awareness of average news from other ones concerning consumption. By doing so, this kind of news even can further influence audience’s conception and realization of fashion, consumption and their own life style.
However, in the process of this research, the researcher found a group of special audience who has superb command over the knowledge of fashion domain. Thanks to the abundant fashion-related cultural capital and acute sense over fashion, they often know clearly about the product information before the celebrities’ effects took over. Thus, they will not fall victim to the influence of media reports. Facing the media and celebrities’ effects, they own their unique interpretation strategies and defy any possible influence of media. As a result, this group of audience has their peculiar way of expressing themselves. They are fed up with popular or trendy clichés and are dying to get rid of them; therefore, celebrities’ images are the heavy burden, not only useless but irksome that need to be shed.