Consumer Culture and Romantic Relationships: Luxury Fashion Consumption, Urban Women and their New Types of Relationships

Yuxuan Li

doi:10.6918/IJOSSER.202412_7(12).0030

Authors

Yuxuan Li

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6918/IJOSSER.202412_7(12).0030

Keywords:

Consumer Culture; Romantic Relationships; Luxury Fashion Consumption; Urban Women; New Types of Relationships.

Abstract

The consumers do not pay for just a product but to satisfy their needs and desires, which are always embedded within cultural, and social symbols and structures. Thus, when the ideology in which the meanings of daily life are to be found by purchasing goods is spreading widely in society. The concept of "consumerism" shifts into a type of popular culture that might influence both the economy and patterns of social interactions. How does consumerism culture have an impact on the two aspects above? What is the relationship between them? To answer the questions, this paper chooses two representative research objects that can specifically reflect current characteristics of society, particularly the group of urban young women, respectively luxury fashion consumption for economy and diversities of intimacy for interpersonal relationships, and tries to analyze the two separately, and then find their correlations. The main results are as follows: first, with the unpopularity trend of traditional "marriage oriented" relationships, there's a positive correlation between changes in women's spending power and diversities of romantic relationships; Besides, the shifts in urban women's attitudes towards romantic love have similar motivations to the increase in sales volume of luxury goods; Then, this paper has a further discussion of a new and highly discussed concept "commercialization of intimacy", and find its close connections with the consumer culture spreading in women's lives.

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