“Prosuming” style on social media : A qualitative research into children’s presentations of clothing and style in TikTok short-form videos

Sammanfattning

TikTok is an app launched in 2017 for short videos between 15 and 60 seconds. The app’s popularity has increased over the past few years, especially among Gen Z. We explore how aesthetic expressions are used to negotiate childhood and gender norms. The data for this thesis consisted of 50 TikTok videos from 10 creators aged 13 to 17. In the current study, we employed a critical discourse analysis (Clark et al., 2021, p. 492), which combines textual, verbal, and visual aspects for the production of analytical findings.Our findings indicate how children express their style through aesthetic modes, dark and light. Children use music and expressions emphasizing softness, anger, purity, and social status. Children also negotiate gender ideals, emphasizing feminine appearance through skirts, dresses, accessories, and makeup. Boys often choose darker, larger clothing and accessories to project a masculine appearance. Both genders assert values of attractiveness, uniqueness, practicality, or innocence. We also find that children construct their identities with followers as agentic actors who both consume materialistic items and produce content. We argue that TikTok operates as an agentic space that enables children to reconstruct social norms and structures through a process commonly referred to as “double hermeneutics” (Gallacher & Kehily 2013, 227, 229). Children reinterpret existing norms and styles, thereby constructing new notions of childhood and children’s fashion cultures that consequently influence aesthetic preferences and perceptions on a broader social level. However, future research could utilize qualitative methods, such as interviews for data collection, to explore children’s perceptions on the topic.