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Paula von WachenfeldtProfessor

About me

My research takes on two directions, one is historical and the other is contemporary and both are based on written and visual representations of fashion and luxury in society. From the first perspective, I have investigated the history of ideas that lied in the concept of luxury in 18th-century France and its significance for social culture. Following the same line of thinking, I have also studied how fashion and luxury became a social practice in pre-revolutionary France and their important connection to the credit business.

In an ongoing research project, I investigate how the phenomenon of fashion came to be associated with women and this by examining the first French fashion magazines that were launched from the 1770s onwards. The project aims to see how the production of meaning around women and fashion took place in print media and how it may have given rise to new female aesthetic and moral ideals. My hypothesis is that already from the middle of the 18th century onwards, new social and cultural conditions in France paved the way for female fashion consumption in which fashion media played a decisive role. An examination of the early French fashion press can reveal the birth of a new type of social discourse brought forward by print media. These, I argue, have given rise to a new gender-divided view of consumption that still lives on today.

From a contemporary perspective, I have focused on how social media have taken over the role of traditional paper media to imbue identity-making practices. The mediation of brands together with a display of a wasteful lifestyle in digital media show how the spread of luxury in society has affected consumers' taste and aesthetic preferences.

In the same spirit, I have investigated how luxury brands feed on the myth that surrounds their goods. This myth is further reinforced by their constant exposure in digital communication channels while eroding the prestigious aura surrounding them.

I am currently co-editor of the anthology Luxury Fashion and Media Communication: Between the Material and Immaterial, which will be published in 2023 by Bloomsbury. The challenge for this volume is to show firstly how luxury in various communication channels easily becomes a bodily claim to the individual's right to pleasure, and secondly how it has developed as an extensive and mythical global industry.

Research projects

Luxury, Fashion and the Early Modern Idea of Credit

Luxury, Fashion and the Early Modern Idea of Credit addresses how social and cultural ideas about credit and trust, in the context of fashion and trade, were affected by the growth and development of the bankruptcy institution.

Research

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • The Mediation of Luxury Brands in Digital Storytelling

    2019. Paula von Wachenfeldt. Fashion theory

    Article

    This paper considers the mediation of luxury fashion brands in the digital storytelling of the social media account named The Rich Kids of Instagram. Since 2012, Instagram users have been encouraged to use the hashtag #rkoi so photos of a lavish lifestyle can be collected together. The conspicuous consumption of these affluent young people from different countries also became Channel 4’s six-episode reality TV show Rich Kids of Instagram. The Instagram accounts and the TV show displaying well-known luxury fashion pieces, splendid cars and private jets are the object of this study.

    The motivation for this investigation comes from the need to reevaluate the idea of luxury and its dissemination in contemporary digital media. As is frequently exposed in social media, and in this particular case on Instagram, we aim to examine the outcome of this display. We intend to argue that the represented world on Instagram and the subsequent TV show distorts the expected or the lived experience of luxury as something distinctive and unique, and turns it into a kitsch object. Drawing on Baudrillard’s approach to mass-media culture (1998), we view kitsch as a category that is not to be confused with the real object (in this respect, the luxury one), but understood as a “pseudo-object” that represents an “aesthetics of simulation” of the original.

    Read more about The Mediation of Luxury Brands in Digital Storytelling

  • Communicating Seduction: Luxury Fashion Advertisements in Video Campaigns

    2018. Paula von Wachenfeldt. Studies in Communication Sciences 18 (2), 353-363

    Article

    This study examines the different themes of communication that take place in video ad campaigns deriving from the French luxury fashion houses Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel, Cartier and Hermès. By using semiology as a method we were able to recognize the themes of adventure, seduction, love and play in the videos. This study explores also how the myth becomes an important meaning-maker of the luxury commodity and fills it with sensations and pleasure. Unlike all other ads, we could see that the meaning of luxury in the Hermès’ ones was not directly connected to the objects per se but to the experience of human senses in contact with nature. We could further conclude that the visual communication of the ads has no need to be logical as long as it can seduce with its positive signs. The object of luxury constitutes a strong communication tool helping the viewer to discover new places, to fall in love, to create magic and to experience the amusement of play. Embedded in recognizable social narratives, the objects in the moving image are provided with a seductive meaning able to support the eternal myth of luxury.

    Read more about Communicating Seduction

  • The Myth of Luxury in a Fashion World

    2018. Paula von Wachenfeldt. Fashion, Style & Popular Culture 5 (3), 313-328

    Article

    If luxury is more relevant today it is perhaps due to its ubiquitous presence. This study examines the meaning of luxury and the myth that surrounds the exclusive goods. How do we classify luxury in relation to fashion? And how can we recognize a luxury item when most of the houses apply the same selling strategies as the ones of the fashion industry? A semiotic analysis of three luxury houses helps us to map out this blurry landscape and this by looking first at the sociocultural signs that are characteristic of a luxury brand, and second, by exploring today’s representations of luxury brands on the market. Findings indicate that the luxury label today can in reality only be restricted to a few houses while the myth of luxury is still trying to blow life in the consumer’s mind.

    Read more about The Myth of Luxury in a Fashion World

  • The Taste of the Good Life: Representations of Luxury in Swedish Media

    2016. Paula von Wachenfeldt. Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption 2 (2), 91-113

    Article

    Recognized as the welfare state with a protective social system based formerly on the idea of equality and concern, Sweden in the twenty-first century is undergoing a change in the attitude toward luxury consumption. This article examines the role of lifestyle magazines and social and visual media in creating idealized images that play on the idea of luxury. The discourse produced hereby indicates a remarkable change in the Swedish self-image and its approach to indulgence and excess.

    Read more about The Taste of the Good Life

  • I fiktionens gömmor döljer sig en modeskatt

    2013. Paula von Wachenfeldt. Parnass (1)

    Article

    Paula von Wachenfeldts artikel, I fiktionens gömmor döljer sig en modeskatt, är en av flera artiklar som på olika sätt berör hur kläder och utseende ger liv och karaktär åt litterära gestalter och hur författare genom historien har använt sig av mode för att definiera sina påhittade figurers sociala ställning, deras personlighet och deras politiska och estetiska värderingar.

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  • Le paradis perdu et retrouvé: Étude de l'innocence et de la culpabilité dans l'oeuvre d'Albert Camus

    2003. Paula von Wachenfeldt.

    Thesis (Doc)

    The aim of this dissertation is to investigate a recurrent idea that dominates the works of Albert Camus, namely the search for man’s innocence. A study of this notion, however, will to the same extent require an examination of guilt, since the signification of the first depends on the second and since both exist in Camus.

    The notion of innocence in Albert Camus’ works L’Étranger, Caligula, Le Malentendu, La Peste, La Chute, L’Exil et le Royaume, Les Justes and the posthumous novel Le Premier Homme appears in three different dimensions: ethical, theological and as a state of virginity. The first dimension refers to the state of the accused man who is not guilty of a given crime, the second represents the state of the first man before sin, according to Christian principles, and the third dimension is to be found particularly in the purity of a child and all acts beyond good and evil.

    Through an analysis of the novels, the plays and the short stories of Camus, it is possible to establish that all the main characters are struggling to find either their own innocence or mankind’s in general. However, their search collides with two different types of guilt, whose significance can be identified thanks to the definitions given by Paul Ricœur, namely ethical-legal (éthico-juridique) and psycho-theological (psycho-théologique) guilt. The first sense of this concept regards the connection between penalty and responsibility, while the second concerns the Christian consciousness of original sin. Moreover, it may be seen that the question of innocence in Camus strongly implicates the question of happiness which is clearly revealed in the plays Caligula and Le Malentendu. This investigation indicates that innocence and happiness belong together, i.e. to be happy “l’homme camusien” has to first feel his innocence.

    There is another crucial point observed in this thesis: the impact that the unfinished novel Le Premier Homme has on understanding Camus’ thought and all his previous production. For it is in this last, autobiographic novel that one can discover the source of all the needs that have been haunting his writing throughout his life. It is in Le Premier Homme in particular that the thirst for innocence investigated in this dissertation is finally extinguished. And this takes place via a return to the simplicity of the world of Camus’ childhood and the relationship to nature, beyond any philosophical or religious language.

    Read more about Le paradis perdu et retrouvé

  • Jaget och föremålet: Föreställningar om lyx i reklamfilmer

    2021. Paula von Wachenfeldt. Modevetenskap. Perspektiv på mode, stil och estetik, 211-236

    Chapter
    Read more about Jaget och föremålet

  • Rational Follies: Fashion, Luxury and Credit in Eighteenth-Century Paris

    2021. Paula von Wachenfeldt. Luxury, Fashion and The Early Modern Idea of Credit, 19-33

    Chapter
    Read more about Rational Follies

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