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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how mobile phones and digital images created affordances for young women to become digital fashionistas or fashion influencers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how young women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, share digital images of their crafted styles via social media apps, especially WhatsApp. Such sharing is an act of influence usually aimed at building a digital fashionista name in that it constitutes a virtual potential for persuading others to copy one’s style. When this potential is engaged with women of status and rank it enables young women to fashion relations of matronage and brings about upward social mobility. In order to reach out to women of status and rank, young women mobilize digital networks of followers from among peers, kin, and strangers relying on their skills, status, and knowledge. By circulating, images of their crafted styles over these networks young women aim to attract followers for advice in fashion and style. Yet virtual images can be easily kept and shared by others allowing followers to compete with fashionistas, form their own groups, and start their own trends. Whether a follower will share an image of one’s style further and thus build one’s name depends on the actual and potential benefits – social, affective, economic – such sharing can bring to the follower herself, revealing, I argue, interdependency between stylish leaders and their wealth in followers as the key to making and maintaining value, digital fashionista name. This article contributes to the literature on fashion and upward social mobility in West Africa by showing how the circulation of digital images over social media networks has created affordances for young women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon to fashion matronage relations and open up upward social mobility paths. More broadly, wealth in followers provides a critique of the neoliberal market valuation of social media influencers illuminating alternative regimes of valuation that inform digital influencer economies.