I've been to paradise
Though Facebook and crypto zealots and the credulous tech media would have us believe that the future of retail is in buying and selling digital objects to outfit ourselves in the metaverse (I always mistype "netaverse" and want to leave it), the more immediate future seems to be in things like the app Depop, typically described as "the fashion resale marketplace beloved by Generation Z," as in this New York Times piece.
Not sure why it has to be a generational thing, but it seems like Depop is just the latest example of the social mediatization of retail. The app feels vaguely modeled after Instagram or TikTok in that it features an aggressive implementation of recommendation algorithms that serves users a personalized feed of small retailers and their particular offerings. I laughed when I saw the screen above, when Depop invited me to "edit my DNA." It was as if my algorithmic profile were genetic code determining my fate, only this time I could actively intervene in it. I guess you could call it jean splicing.
This kind of setup foregrounds a one-to-one (or, even more dubiously, "peer-to-peer") pseudo-intimacy between buyer and seller, a sort of parasocial retail in which shoppers participate less in a big brand's recognizability and whatever identity it is trying to associate itself with and more in a direct (albeit aspirational) relationship with a relatable influencer-retailer. Since everybody on broadcast social media platforms is selling something anyway, why not wear your likes rather than simply tally them?
The logic of this approach currently culminates in the apparent opportunity to buy clothes directly from "a celebrity's closet," which seems like an evasive wording that allows shoppers to imagine that the celebrity actually wore the specific garment they've now received. Maybe you get a certificate of authenticity, or the clothes come soiled with an NFT of the celebrity's actual sweat.
Buying clothes because a particular person is selling them parallels a development toward parasociality across consumerism. Selling goods as signifiers of desirable traits or a particular lifestyle is subordinated to selling a fantasy of a sustained relationship with an idealized person, who often stands in as a version of the consumer's own idealized self. Put another way, products have become even more obviously insufficient in and of themselves to sustain the fantasies with which they are associated, especially in comparison with the fantasies and gratifications of parasociality. Why settle for belonging to a brand community when you can wear Doja Cat's scarf?
If, as sociologist Colin Campbell would have it, consumerism is about goods continually stoking our fantasies with promises that actual consumption always disappoints, parasocial retailing is a way to re-enchant those promises or forestall that disappointment, disperse it in the serial tokens of intimacy that can be parceled out "peer to peer." Social media, from this perspective, offer a way to disguise forms of mass marketing as personal and intimate, when in fact they are personalized and algorithmic. This allows you to consume yourself as an idea — using Depop lets you have a parasocial engagement with an idealized version of yourself, as well as all the retailers who mediate that ideal self. The same is true of any algorithmically sorted app. As this paper by Aparajita Bhandari and Sara Bimo argues, "The experience of using TikTok is one of repeatedly engaging with one’s own self: intra rather than interpersonal connection." Or you might say that It is intrapersonal by way of seeming interpersonal, as though having "personal relationships" was solely a means of self-discovery, a form of wellness consumption.
For Campbell, consumerism is less about materialistic acquisitiveness than it is about developing and nurturing an imaginative capacity — being able to imagine that having more stuff will actually make you feel like you've had more experience or grown in some way. It is to enjoy a vicarious experience of your future self. Consumerism requires that we develop the ability to tell ourselves convincing stories that can withstand the fact that owning things doesn't really change us or even please us all that much. Campbell dwells on the gap between imagining having something and actually getting it, locating the pleasure in anticipation and day-dreaming about possessing something rather than the actual utility of the thing itself — making "desiring itself a pleasurable activity," he writes.
Parasociality is imaginative in similar ways: A fantasy space is maintained in which the promise of more intimacy or deeper connection can be maintained but never fulfilled, and one can learn to find a pleasure in disavowing that impossibility. You can buy into the person who is marketing their personality without ever being disappointed by gaining actual access to it. You can buy the feelings of friendship without the annoyance of actual friends, who often have an agenda other than making you feel important.