Thesis

Framing practices, spaces and socialities of consumption in vintage

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Awarding institution
  • University of Strathclyde
Date of award
  • 2014
Thesis identifier
  • T13889
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Abstract
  • This thesis explores how practices, spaces and socialities intersect in the consumption of vintage. The study is based within Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) with a particular focus on studies that consider alternative spaces and practices of consumption. Vintage has become a widespread movement in the UK that encompasses production, marketing and consumption, but it has largely been omitted from the consumer research discussions to date. As a site of enquiry this ethnographic study focuses within the vintage 'pop-up markets' of Glasgow, UK and considers the vintage scene as an embodied set of social practices and values. This thesis addresses four research objectives detailing the 'doings' of vintage from a practice perspective and extends the CCT understanding of the 'circuit of practice' to be spatially bound. The markets exist as marginal sites of consumption and were found to be active spaces that were an amalgamation of market objects, actors and values that encoded particular practices. The findings of this study contribute to CCT in demonstrating how objects, practices and knowledge intersected in the marketspace in the performance of the alternative. This research contributes to an understanding of the consumer as an active practitioner in the marketspace and the aesthetic labour this necessitates. Further it finds the vintage tribe as a collective consumption site of learning and apprenticeship. The findings advance consumer research understandings of space with the pop-up markets as a practiced space of 'the familiar'. The final contribution frames the 'fluidity of value' in vintage as liminal and transient in practice. The study concludes by emphasising the importance of a turn to a practice perspective methodologically within the CCT landscape and the development of future research opportunities that probe market labour, formation and creativity in practice.
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DOI
Date Created
  • 2014
Former identifier
  • 1041769

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