Relevance, commitment, and impact: Aspirational formulations of investing-related influencer collaborations in the context of ethical fashion

Influencers are a prominent part of social media as cultural producers and creative labourers. While early definitions considered social media influencers as “everyday, ordinary Internet users” with a large following on social media and a possibility to monetise their following (Abidin, 2015: para. 1), the professionalisation of influencers, including the evolving forms of collaboration with companies and brands, has shifted scholarly attention to their work as entrepreneurs and visible tastemakers (e.g., Arriagada & Bishop, 2021; van Driel & Dumitrica, 2021). In the context of fashion, influencers have been deemed influential in challenging established understandings and boundaries of the fashion system through creating distinctive digital fashion spheres, such as the fashion blogosphere (Laurell, 2016).

Research addressing influencers from the perspective of work and labour has highlighted them as professionals in their own right beyond the commercial value they may produce. Influencer labour is strongly gendered and often takes place in feminised social media spaces and platforms (Abidin & Gwynne, 2017). Critiques of digital labour have unpacked the “ways in which women’s often low or unpaid digital labours require them to invest affective energy and time as they produce content that generates profit for online platforms” (McFarlane et al., 2022: 1212–1213). Influencer work thus represents the kind of gender-coded and promotional social media work that is often undervalued both economically and socially, and an easy target of criticism from elite positions (Duffy & Sawey, 2022), especially as it connects to fields that are stereotypically considered frivolous – such as lifestyle, beauty, and fashion (Duffy, 2020; Scharff, 2024).

The work of social media influencers incorporates an array of “labours”, including aspirational, affective, and authenticity labour, which are often invisible, intangible, and therefore undervalued. As a form of aspirational labour, influencer work has been described as a “forward-looking, carefully orchestrated, and entrepreneurial form of creative cultural production” (Duffy, 2016: 446) performed in the hope of future compensation or appreciation. Aspirational labour connects to the ideal of influencers earning a living by “doing what they love” (Duffy, 2016: 443) and, in the case of influencer marketing, “promoting products or services that they really love” [emphasis original] (Duffy, 2020: 2; see also McFarlane et al., 2022). It entails curating an “authentic”, entrepreneurial self and building affective relationships with one’s community, while also “devoting” oneself to certain commercial brands (Duffy, 2016).

Authenticity labour, more generally, refers to “being true to one’s self and brand and being true to one’s audience” (Wellman et al., 2020: 68). Hence, it includes both managing the audience’s expectations and adhering to consistent personal ethics (Arnesson, 2023; Banet-Weiser, 2021), for instance, in terms of choosing “ethical” brands to collaborate with (Jacobson & Harrison, 2022). Influencers are tasked with reconciling their sometimes-contradictory positionings between commerciality and authenticity as they are considered to be “both promoters of consumption, and marshals of ‘authentic’ sociality and community” (Arriagada & Bishop, 2021: 568). The nature of influencers’ labour thus becomes increasingly defined through their ethical aspirations, as they seek continued relevance as mediators between socially oriented companies and socially conscious consumers. This is highlighted in the field of fashion, which has become increasingly contested due to the growing public awareness of the environmental and social costs of fast fashion feeding off the abundant display of consumerism in social media (Horton, 2018).

In the last few years, many scholars have highlighted the intrinsic and increasingly visible interplay of politics and promotion in contemporary influencer culture, showing how influencers have come to personify sociopolitical issues such as sustainability and feminism on their platforms (e.g., Arnesson, 2023, 2024; Arnesson & Reinikainen, 2024; Scharff, 2024). Even influencers who have become popular for producing lifestyle content have started merging societal issues with personal and commercial posts (Lehto & Mannevuo, 2023) and engaging with political topics in ways that accentuate their power and potential as opinion leaders (Suuronen et al., 2022). While endorsing a certain company or product, for example, influencers might simultaneously emphasise socially or environmentally conscious consumption, thus advocating a sustainable lifestyle (Riedl et al., 2021). Moreover, by promoting particular lifestyles to aspire to, influencers may address their followers according to a corporate or ideological agenda and thereby come to act, more or less consciously, as “ideological intermediaries”, that is, mediators for broader value systems and worldviews (Arnesson, 2023).

As visible cultural actors, influencers engage in consumption in a very public way and are held accountable for their choices by a wide and often critical followership. If influencers engage in constant product endorsement in an uncritical manner, they may face accusations of encouraging an unsustainable interest in consumption (Arnesson, 2024). In the fashion and lifestyle context, highlighting fair fashion and thrifting have thus become a way for influencers to build their own self-brand (Leban et al., 2021), for example, as “sustainable fashion influencers” (Jacobson & Harrison, 2022). Choosing to collaborate with actors who align with their values and bringing forth the sustainable or ethical qualities of the companies they collaborate with indicate that for the influencers, “ethicality means not only ‘doing the right thing’ but also showcasing or displaying ethicality online” (Leban et al., 2021: 230).

The inseparability of political engagement and commercial interests is exemplified by the emergence of “activist-influencers” (Scharff, 2024). Such influencer activism is often considered superficial and individualistic (Dean, 2024), and the relationship between the positions of activist and influencer remains tensional. As demonstrated by Scharff (2024), influencers themselves also reproduce the established portrayals of activism as a serious pursuit, as opposed to influencing as a feminised and trivial one: Activist-influencers may seek to differentiate from the position of an influencer and instead consider themselves as first and foremost activists who happen to operate on social media platforms.

Our materials consist of blog posts (n = 8, related to IVALO) and Instagram posts (n = 47, of which 19 are related to IVALO and 28 related to Lovia) posted by the social media influencers and case companies during 2019–2021. The posts are written in Finnish and English, and the former have been translated by the authors, where applicable, in presenting examples.

Seven bloggers participated in IVALO’s campaign. They each published one text on their personal blog, with the exception of one blogger who had two posts. All the bloggers may be placed under the category of lifestyle, as they cover a variety of themes from fashion, style, and beauty to travel, food, culture, and training. Issues of sustainable lifestyle can be found in the bloggers’ content to a varying extent; some explicitly state it as their focus while others were not previously known for sustainability-related content. The blog posts consist of lengthy texts and several pictures showing the bloggers wearing apparel sold in the online marketplace accompanied by links to the products; as such, they may be considered to promote both the crowdfunding campaign and the company along with its offerings. Characteristic of the blog genre, the texts include a diversity of personal reflections. When compared, however, they reveal many overlaps in content, such as phrases describing the company and its funding round. This indicates that the influencers had been provided with guidance and materials by the company. IVALO’s influencer collaboration was also visible on Instagram, where several of the aforementioned bloggers, but also other influencers as well as the company and related brands, published campaign-related posts.

Seven influencers (of which two operate through a shared account) participated in Lovia’s campaign on Instagram. Each contributed two posts, except for one influencer who had a single post. The influencers collaborating with Lovia represent different themes within the realm of lifestyle: one is clearly focused on fashion and has started her career as a blogger; two others are running a (women-focused) collective around investing and finance; and the remaining are Finnish media personalities representing different occupations (e.g., journalist, radio and television host, celebrity cook, photographer). The Instagram posts by the influencers and the company consist of lengthy captions and several pictures shot professionally in a studio setting depicting the influencers both as a group and posing individually with the co-designed bags. The campaign utilised causerelated marketing through announcing that a donation to a women’s organisation was made for each bag purchased. The texts share similarities in form and style, as they are clearly designed to create a coherent campaign.

In comparing our two empirical cases, none of the influencers participated in both campaigns. This indicates a slight difference in emphasis: Whereas IVALO chose to collaborate with a group of influencers prominent in the Finnish fashion and lifestyle blogosphere, most of Lovia’s collaborators and co-designers are more widely known to the public from other domains. In the campaign context, the influencers made references to each other in different ways: in IVALO’s case as a group of ambassadors or “influencer-investors”, and in Lovia’s case more generally as a group of women or owners.

The dataset, while limited in size, offers specificity in representing an emerging phenomenon. In addition, it is multimodal and semiotically rich, comprising photographs, written text, emojis, and other resources, hence allowing for a multifaceted micro-level analysis. We analysed the texts from the perspectives of representation and positioning as practices of discursive meaning-making, taking both written and visual aspects of the texts into consideration. Representation refers to ways of discursively expressing and constructing aspects of the world from particular perspectives, in ways that draw on and connect to broader systems of meaning (e.g., Fairclough, 2003: 26). We focused especially on how the texts represent the interlinking domains of investing, consumption, and influencing. By positioning, we refer to the process by which identities come to be produced by socially and culturally available discourses (Burr, 1995). Positioning is a reciprocal process, whereby subjects are simultaneously produced by discourses and shaping those discourses, and where the discursive positioning of the self always implies the positioning of the other (Davies & Harré, 1990).

Our analytical process comprised several rounds of close reading and coding in connection to our theoretical work and research questions. We started by identifying passages where influencers referred to themselves or their followers as (potential) investors, shareholders, funders, or owners, or to the investing, funding, fundraising, and so on, and analysed how influencers reasoned about becoming investors. This brought up a variety of rationales for investing in relation to consumption and influencer work. Next, we focused on the affective aspects of the data, analysing the use of emotion discourse, emojis, and photographs, and identifying recurring emotions related to investing, brands, companies, ethical fashion, and social issues. Drawing on these observations, we started to systematise the data into discursive formulations where positionings and affective discourse combined in recurrent and recognisable ways. By using the term discursive formulations, we wish to draw similarities to “discourses” as established systems of meaning (e.g., Fairclough, 2003), while also recognising their distinctive, context-specific nature as “formulations” that evolve in the course of social media communication.

The first formulation articulates investing-related collaborations as a foreign and exciting endeavour that re-energises the influencer’s relation to the self and the influencer community. Lifestyle and fashion influencers talk about investing from a novice perspective and express excitement for the novel position of the investor. Excitement is expressed through vocabulary such as hyped, excited, or amazing; typography such as all caps and boldface; and emojis such as flame and lightning. The novelty of the position is explicitly claimed by vocabulary like new, become, change, and first time. The following examples express the exciting (future) shift in position in terms of feeling grown-up and becoming an investor as news.

So very soon I will be officially an investor in ethical fashion. I’m so excited – and oh I feel so grown-up! (Blog, IVALO – Harasek, 2019a)

Wonderful news! I joined the Lovia story as an investor with six other strong women, the Revolutionisers bag campaign is now live. (Instagram, Lovia – Himanka, 2021)

While influencer endorsements, especially those of the spokesperson type (Rundin & Colliander, 2021), are typically based on the influencer knowing the brand or product for a longer time or having personal experience in using it, investing is, by contrast, represented as a step onto a new terrain. Many influencers highlight their novice position and express surprise or even joyous disbelief in finding themselves in this new place.

Here we are, Lovia’s new investors Someone pinch me for real! The fact that I have ended up as part of this crowd and can stand (sit) in a row with these women feels quite unreal. (Instagram, Lovia – Vanninen, 2021)

2019 is clearly a year of change. I guess all years are like that for me, but this time the reason is quite big: I’m investing in shares for the first time. It feels wild to write this because a) investing is a big and world-changing thing b) on the other hand, I feel like how on earth have I never invested in anything before? [emphasis original] (Blog, IVALO – Reinman, 2019)

In terms of positioning, then, influencers discursively dissociate from the familiar experience-based and product-oriented role of the endorser. Investing as a form of collaboration is represented as something profoundly different – not only a different way of doing, but as effectively and categorically becoming something new. The text in the Lovia example above is accompanied by a photograph of the seven influencers in the campaign, posing with the bags they have co-designed for the brand, looking at the camera with a determined expression. In this way, the familiar style of the fashion photograph together with the expression, “Here we are, Lovia’s new investors”, creates an unconventional portrayal of investors.

More generally, influencers utilising this formulation embrace and draw on broader discourses of change and (self-)development to claim a socially aware and re-energised influencer position. Renewal is explicitly manifested as one of the influencers self-identifies as an “influencer-investor”, commenting on this identity with an appreciative, emotional exclamation of “oooooh what a term!”

By emphasising the effects of investing-related collaboration on influencer identity, this formulation focalises the influencer’s relationship to their own self-brand. The company brand involved in the collaboration is represented in a positive light, but mostly in an identity-enhancing way, as a symbolic, desired possession (see Aspara, 2009). Hence, the primary aspiration in this formulation is the continuous cultivation of the influencer’s position in relation to followers and the influencer community, and the concurrent renewal of cultural relevance. In contrast to more established, product-focused forms of influencer marketing that have begun to create fatigue (Seo et al., 2019), investing-related collaborations appear as something new and fresh, and they may have an energising effect on the influencer’s work.

While the first formulation emphasises the exciting novelty of the influencer-investor position, the second formulation, by contrast, highlights continuity, representing investing-based collaboration as a serious and long-term commitment. Influencers connect investing to expressions of value-based emotional commitment with brands, products, and the broader idea of ethical fashion. Through metaphors of starting or joining a common journey, influencers conceptualise investing as the beginning of, or the next step in, a deepening connection with the brand.

Lovia makes bags out of garbage. The company’s ideology got us excited – to become first customers, then collaborators and now shareholders. (Instagram, Lovia – Mimmit sijoittaa, 2021)

Many influencers express their affection for the company or brand in narrative terms as a progressing story, recalling the origins and thereby signalling the durability of the emotion. Affective appreciation for the brand and its founders is often connected to respect for or valuation of qualities associated with it, such as ethical production, entrepreneurship, (Finnish) design, and ethical fashion.

When IVALO offered me the role of brand ambassador about a year ago, I jumped at the idea with enthusiasm, because I love the concept of online shopping. I have always been interested in domestic fashion and the clothes of small, original brands both in Finland and around the world. (Blog, IVALO – Rotonen, 2019)

With Lovia, I was impressed from the beginning by the values and company philosophy of Lovia’s founder […]. Lovia’s design is inspired by Kainuu, Finland, where my grandmother also comes from. (Instagram, Lovia – Koutaniemi, 2021)

In this formulation, investing is not represented as categorically different from consumption or an identity-changing endeavour. Instead, it is placed on a continuum of engagement and represented as a part of the repertoire of influencer work alongside product endorsement and co-design. Influencers dissociate from campaign-type, one-off billboard influencer collaborations, and navigate towards a more multifaceted idea of entrepreneurial influencer work (see Rundin & Colliander, 2021; McFarlane et al., 2022).

Expressing sustained engagement with and reflection on the things that the company does and represents may be considered an authenticity strategy (Arnesson, 2023) that anchors the unfamiliar idea of investing to the more recognisable aspects of the influencer persona, such as their aesthetic taste and ethical values. This link is constructed multimodally, especially in the IVALO case, where the investing-related verbal reflections are connected to photographs of influencers in brand apparel, each showcasing their own personal aesthetics and style.

The formulation of long-term commitment focalises the influencer-brand relationship by representing both parties as partners on a journey. The emerging aspiration relates to a sort of ethical entrepreneurship, where investment strengthens the partnership through which the influencer and the brand can jointly construct ethicality in the field of fashion.

In the third formulation, investing is represented as a way of making an impact and driving social change. Influencers use affective and activist discourse, including expressions of purpose and faith (e.g., through verbs like want and believe) and collective power (together), to express a sense of moral duty and a social-change orientation.

I made the first investment of my life: I decided to join in funding @ivalo_official world conquest through a crowdfunding campaign. I believe that together we have the opportunity to impact what the fashion world will be like in the future - together we are strong (Instagram, IVALO – Viena K, 2019b)

In this formulation, investing is implicitly compared with consumption-based collaborations. In the following extracts, influencers emphasise the concrete impacts of investment in ways that may be read as contrasting with other, less privileged types of support. The latter extract also draws on activist discourse by representing the partner company’s transparency practice as exemplary in order to express a more general stance:

I invest in IVALO primarily because I want to be a concrete part of changing the fashion world in a more responsible direction. (Blog, IVALO – Viena K, 2019a)

Production is traceable and transparent. Each bag has a unique DNA code that tells you where and how the bag was made. I would like more of this from other companies too. Honesty.

As shareholders, we can be very concretely present in Lovia’s story! (Instagram, Lovia – Mikkola, 2021)

While investing is clearly represented as something that works in a different way than consumption-based participation, the specific ways in which investing drives change are not explained in detail. On a general level, however, the entanglement of investing, purpose, and change seems to connect to the contemporary financial discourse of “impact” investing.

On some occasions, the influencers engage in longer reflections depicting their ongoing struggles over and growing awareness of social and environmental issues. Such reflections draw on political and activist registers in ways that extend the influencer role towards a more general activist-citizen role. It may be read as a way of constructing legitimacy for the influencer as a relevant actor in the domain of activism, or a strategy of privileging the activist position and creating distance from the role of “influencer”. In the following example, the activist position is highlighted by the use of the influencer’s signature, a black cross-mark emoji that signals personal stake and commitment:

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This is the direction to which I want to encourage the fashion world with my own choices: away from fast fashion and disposable culture, towards responsible thinking and sustainable production methods. I don’t want to be guessing about the conditions my clothes were made in or at whose expense quality and price were trampled down. I want to wear and love my clothes for a long time, repair and maintain them. And when I buy something new, I want to support brands that think like me.

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That’s why I joined @ivalo_official’s crowdfunding campaign as a brand ambassador and investor […] (Instagram, IVALO – Harasek, 2019b)

The concrete impact formulation focalises the relationship between the influencer and the broader domain of environmental and social challenges: Investing in the company is represented as a way of directly funding its ethical work, and the collaborating company appears primarily as a vehicle for change. This formulation is mainly realised through written text. Visual references to activism or sustainability are rare apart from occasional emojis referring to power or empowerment, or environmental themes.

In terms of positioning, influencers in this formulation manage preconceptions concerning both influencer work and investing. They detach from the popular, often dismissive view of influencer “marketing”, and associate instead with the complex, politically oriented activist-influencer position (Dean, 2024; Scharff, 2024). Moreover, by highlighting the impact potential of investing, they detach from the mainstream discourse of investing as a financial, profit-driven endeavour and effectively reframe it as a project of social and political influence.