Digitizing female fashion

Before the turn of the millennium, the fashionable customers of seamstresses and tailors in Africa – belonging to what Mustafa in Senegal called the ‘sartorial ecumene’ (Reference Mustafa2002) – relied on those with cameras, professional (and usually male) photographers, to document their styles and extend their display beyond the moment of wearing. Indeed, as the literature on photography in Africa highlights (Pinther and Ng Reference Pinther and Ng2007; Wendl Reference Wendl2001) and as the popular Cameroonian saying goes, ‘one goes to a studio to photograph clothes’. Photographers in Yaoundé frequented events and ceremonies, as well as seamstresses’ and tailors’ shops, and the resulting style photographs became advertisements for the styles portrayed. Customers, seamstresses and tailors would thus purchase printed images of their own and others’ styles to compose fashion catalogues in plasticized photographic albums for clients to flip through. Thus, even as a garment departed its site of production, its photograph would keep advertising it. Guests to private homes were shown personal albums in which images of styles were exhibited, extending (Mustafa Reference Mustafa2002; Bastian Reference Bastian, Hansen and Madison2013; Sylvanus Reference Sylvanus, van Wyk and Posel2019) and praising their owners’ names (Adéè̇kó Reference Adéè̇kó2012; Barber Reference Barber1991). Borrowing, exchanging, gifting or snatching photographs was a common visual means of shaping reputations, even though this was at times unwelcome, especially for those of lower status and wealth who often had only one printed copy of the style.

The post-Cold War media and trade liberalization refashioned the dynamics of making fashion in Yaoundé. In the late 2000s, inexpensive android phones with decent cameras flooded the Cameroonian market, making image creation easy and cheap. At the same time, cheap Chinese versions of traditional pagne textiles became widely available, with the lowest grade selling for as little as 3,000 FCFA (€4.50), half the cost of local products and less than a fifth of the price of imports. Pagne fashion became increasingly accessible to young women (cf. Fokwang Reference Fokwang2015; Pommerolle and Ngaméni Reference Pommerolle and Ngaméni2015). As Annie neatly put it, now one could be ‘Fashion 24/7’. By 2016, heightened competition among telecoms networks had driven the price of a daily 1GB data allowance down to just 10,000 FCFA (€15) per month. Going online was now accessible, infrastructure permitting, which enabled young women to keep honing their fashion expertise, often in between household chores and other duties. Phone cameras and photo-editing apps offered new creative tools, while cheap data meant that these digital fashion advertisements could be affordably shared. Television, movies and telenovelas popularized gendered neoliberal myths of social ascent achieved through the body, beauty and fashion. These stoked young women’s desires to invest in fashion, desires that were equally embedded in Cameroonian practices of fashion socialization, as well as in desires for upward social mobility, understood as economic, political and intimate security. Within this context, fashion-making, modelling and advertising (Figure 1) represented valued and arguably increasingly gendered types of aspirational work (Duffy Reference Duffy2016).

Figure 1. A style made for work – advertising a product (2017). Used with permission of the photographer.

Young women were walking along busy roads to save their taxi fare for new garments. They photographed new and second-hand items (nouveaux arrivages) displayed outside shops and by itinerant sellers, and at the market stands they would try on clothes and headgear and request a photograph using the camera on their phones. Passers-by would stop women on the street and ask to photograph their styles, and they would pose like models on a catwalk while others stopped to watch, turning the street into a runway (Wissinger Reference Wissinger2015). Television series, fashion shows and even videos of social events such as marriages or funerals were combed for inspiration, with viewers using their phones to photograph the TV screen when they saw a style they admired. Others would wait for cheaper night-time data rates to browse the internet in search of tutorials or footage of recent fashion shows from Paris or Milan. They studied fashion blogs and downloaded images and assiduously surveyed and surveilled others’ styles, in sewing shops but more often on peers’ Facebook walls. It was crucial to know who wore what, where and when, to keep abreast of the competition. Images of styles were edited, catalogued and classified into digital collections such as ‘everyday dress’, ‘evening dress’ and ‘funeral dress’, constantly integrating ‘the latest’. That is, these organized, patient, meticulous investments in fashion involved digital work. The resulting personal digital fashion collections, each distinctive and curated, complemented and competed with existing commercial fashion catalogues, locally made fashion posters and calendars, and personal print photographic albums. Crucially for those young women on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, phones allowed them to make, gather and assemble images of styles they had not yet made or paid for. Thus equipped, they could not only make but also share images of designs and styles, mobilizing fashion to create influence and build a name (cf. Gilbert Reference Gilbert2019).

Stella, whom we met in the opening vignette, saved up for two months to pay for the stitching of a unique style she had worked to develop, and at last excitedly brought the neatly ironed garment home in a black plastic bag (Figure 2). Alone one afternoon, she carefully laid out the dress on her bed, spending time rearranging it and searching for the best light in the room. She placed it on the bed, on a chair and on a hanger, photographing it from the front and back as she sought to highlight different details. But relying solely on selfies compromised the image: the frame could not contain the whole garment. So she asked a student neighbour who worked as an itinerant photographer to help her set up a photo shoot. He used her phone as a camera, and during the session Stella walked as if she were a star on an imagined red carpet, displaying her ‘unique’ style and striking a variety of poses, as do celebrities displaying their dresses at mediatized, camera-dense events. She placed her legs and hands to accentuate the contours of her dress – poses that hark back to black-and-white photography and remain popular in studio photography today (Vokes Reference Vokes2019). Throughout the following week, Stella reworked and edited the images in between her household chores, during taxi rides to the market to help her aunt, and late at night. She increased the images’ contrast, foregrounding the dress so that the virtual image generated the desired sensory effect of catching and prolonging the attention of the viewers.

Figure 2. A style that Stella developed for months and for which she saved money (2016).

In crafting these images, young women reiterated certain general rules of creating visual effects. They aimed to enhance attractiveness, seizing and prolonging viewers’ attention through a combination of light, sheen and volume – what Stella referred to as catching or ‘hitting the eye’ (bien marrier pour frapper) – and echoing how their elders had made and displayed scarification (Bohannan Reference Bohannan1956). Such visual rules derived from broader techniques of attention (Pedersen et al. Reference Pedersen, Albris and Seaver2021) that pertained to embodied knowledge and structured much of young women’s everyday lives in relation to fashion and beyond. As Stella explained, fried bananas are cut and displayed at an angle to call attention to their size and to influence – enhance – viewers’ perception of them. Similarly, young women’s digital images of styles were meant to develop their image or brand as a digital fashionista, by producing and enhancing the visual attention of the viewer, like catalogue advertisements.

Indeed, note how Stella’s photo session described above resembled a product shoot for an advertisement, while the edited images resembled those fashion advertisements found in the catalogues under her bed. She worked to present her style in the best light with the intention of prolonging viewers’ attention through her skills of display. When virtual images are shared, what attracts and retains followers are the resulting visual sensations – what Munn called desirability (Reference Munn1986) and Ahmed refers to as affects (Reference Ahmed2004), here circulated through, among others, virtual images of styles. The sensations generated by a style are created, reassembled and conjured differently depending on the material form that mediates that style (Munn Reference Munn1986): its size, volume and weight. Young women knew that virtual images could travel far and fast over the phone, yet, as already noted, they considered their small size unsatisfactory as it would not allow the whole garment to fit. This was compensated for by volume – producing numerous images of each style from a variety of different viewpoints designed to show as much of the garment as possible. The resulting advertisement features aimed to reiterate and amplify the fashionista’s followers’ visual sensations with a view to capturing and maintaining their attention (Gell Reference Gell, Coote and Shelton1992). In other words, phones and social media apps afforded extensions for steering and heightening attention to the visual aspect of display, making techniques of attention (Pedersen et al. Reference Pedersen, Albris and Seaver2021; Warnier Reference Warnier, Bevan and Wengrow2010; Mauss Reference Mauss1973) reproducible and scalable in new ways (Miller et al. Reference Miller2016).

Wealth-in-followers

Most of the young women I worked with managed WhatsApp fashion groups with between nine and twenty members; each had from one to seven groups and WhatsApp was the only app used for this purpose during the time of my fieldwork. Most of the digital fashion groups displayed similar dynamics, with members having connections outside the group and mostly interacting in virtual time and space. For example, Stella’s peer Tina had a WhatsApp group with ten members: four peers from her biology course, one newly married female neighbour, and two married female cousins. The group also included her seamstress and two women of a different ethnicity whom she had met through the seamstress. Tina’s fellow students were from wealthy families, with parents working in medium- and large-scale trade and lower state administration, or from families that ranked high in village and chiefdom hierarchies. She considered two of them close friends (amies intimes). The female neighbour was married to a successful businessman. Her cousins lived outside Yaoundé and she saw them no more than once or twice a year, usually at funerals in her ancestral village.

The ways in which these groups were constituted partly resembled all-female credit and savings associations (Feldman-Savelsberg and Ndonko Reference Feldman-Savelsberg and Ndonko2010) and the broader dynamics through which groupings in the region have historically been fashioned (Kopytoff Reference Kopytoff1987). Unlike other digital influencers who commonly do not know nor have to know their followers, the young women who aspired to become digital fashionistas usually first transformed existing relationships into virtual followers, starting from kin (ibid.). For example, Stella’s aunt worked in a clothing shop in Yaoundé’s central market, importing and selling clothes from Turkey, Dubai and China, and Stella would often help her to design displays to ‘catch the eye’. Stella also had an uncle who traded in pagnes, and helping him unpack and categorize newly arrived textiles taught her to differentiate between grades of textiles and to discern their provenance through touch. In return for her help, he gifted her pagnes. Vicky, her seamstress, was her cousin and would sew her dresses on time and on credit, a common though sometimes unwelcome duty, as ‘famille c’est à credit’ (family, that’s on credit). These kin relations, key to refining young women’s fashion competencies and realizing their dresses, were among the first members of their digital groups (Guyer and Belinga Reference Guyer and Belinga1995).

Alongside family members, most young women also attempted to extend their following by inviting university classmates and campus neighbours who expressed interest in their styles (Kopytoff Reference Kopytoff1987). For example, Tina’s group included four peers from her computer science degree as well as a seamstress from her neighbourhood. In Stella’s case, however, only two out of four invited peers accepted her invitation, perhaps suggesting competing allegiances. But those peers who are requested to join constitute the potential of forms of work other than kin, who might help update fashion competencies and offer pagnes or do jobs, thus increasing the chance that styles might be stitched on time or at all. It was through peers that a fashionista might expand attention to her styles by engaging them to share images further, as university-age peers with fewer responsibilities tended to have more time available to spend online than kin whose family and work obligations needed to be prioritized.

While image sharing was geared towards reaching women of status and wealth through whom paths to upward social mobility might be fashioned, the ‘composition’ of followers (Guyer and Belinga Reference Guyer and Belinga1995) – their various skills, labours and resources – was intended to facilitate access to a sustained flow of images of fashions, with a view to making a name as a digital fashionista. For wealth-in-followers was also one’s ‘wealth-in-knowledge’ (ibid.), wherein followers were valued for their singular skills and embodied labour that might be pooled to sustain one’s name – the extent to which they might open up a path to social mobility, whether they were friends or kin or might scale up transactions, whether they could produce dresses or provide textiles or help update competencies, or the amount of time they spent online – rather than only in neoliberal terms as quantified commensurate entities whose attention is to be monetized (Senft Reference Senft2013; Rocamora Reference Rocamora2022).

Other followers might be recruited, as Stella showed in the opening vignette, in taxis, at school, during celebrations, gatherings and events, at the market or in church. Yet digital means made it possible not only for fashionistas to set up several groups but also for their followers to participate simultaneously in several virtual groupings without letting others know. Thus, aspiring fashionistas, already competing for the attention of wealthy women of status and rank, were also compelled to ‘compete for the attention’ of their peers (Fuh Reference Fuh2012). This competition involved, for instance, responding promptly to queries about a textile’s colour or place of purchase, or providing extra images of a style. Depending on the relative importance of a particular follower at a given time, fashionistas might go to considerable lengths. Some, for example, left church services or classes to respond to calls, or they travelled across town to meet a group member at a seamstress. Some recorded videos or voice messages detailing and correcting errors in style. In doing so, young women leveraged their followers’ lack of knowledge to build and assert superiority by offering volumes of style expertise. The considerable lengths young women went to were meant to create ‘brand loyalty’: that is, to fashion and strengthen one’s rights-in-followers – establishing and extending the duration and frequency of requests and responses and returns of influence in various online and offline forms – so that followers would make desirable returns to them rather than someone else.

Becoming a fashionista remained desirable for many young women, however, and some followers, particularly peers, would improve their own competencies and fashion skills and could become potential competitors. They often saved received images, changing them a bit (changer un peu) to innovate and leave their own imprint with the hope of starting a trend. Some would crop out the wearer’s head and claim the image as their own when forwarding it, erasing the originator and thus decreasing her potential influence. When one of Annie’s peers attempted to claim Annie’s style as her own by reworking it slightly and sharing the resulting images on her own WhatsApp group, Annie publicly ejected her from all her groups and drove a backlash against the ex-follower. Wariness of this kind of competition was one reason why digital groups were kept small and invitations limited – one could not be sure if a follower would act loyally and share one’s styles further, thus amplifying one’s potential influence, or if, on the contrary, they might weaken one’s influence by working to establish their name at the cost of the originator. Put differently, in order to emerge as digital fashionistas, many young women made use of the concealment of the act of sharing afforded by digital means – one knew only partially how many followers other women had and who was actually following whom (Archambault Reference Archambault2017).

Phones allowed young women to circulate virtual images with the aim of directing and maintaining others’ attention regarding their styles. Rather than have someone see the actual garment or borrow it for their seamstress to copy, rather than having to print images of the style and then travel to distribute them further, young women could just repeatedly send an image while sitting at home. Or they could call or send a ‘bip’ (call-back request) so that thorny style details could be expertly explained. Bene, for example, avoided meeting her followers, instead sending additional images. This also secured competitive advantages and style leadership by keeping a check on apprenticeship, as followers could not observe how the fashionista assembled a particular style or discern her principles for composing collections, nor see her notebooks of drawings, her wardrobes or suitcases of almost-ready garments, nor watch how she practised displaying her forthcoming styles in front of a mirror. Young women eagerly shared or revealed certain parts of their expert competence, but they concealed or withheld others. Rather than replicating other forms of social media influence by offering one’s followers feelings of intimacy or closeness (e.g. Abidin Reference Abidin2018), these young women maintained and enhanced their distance from followers (Miller et al. Reference Miller2016), in part because of the potential for sabotage that intimate friends can bring (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2013; Gilbert Reference Gilbert2018). While the volume of images shared could strengthen rights-in-followers, temporarily asserted hierarchies, the potentials of concealed sharing and informal behind-the-scenes apprenticeship meant that competition was only ever a step away. Thus, virtual wealth-in-followers was a tenuous formation.

Wealth-in-prospects

Having carefully curated her images for a week, Tina finally messaged the members of her ‘Everyday Dress’ WhatsApp group to announce the launch of her new style, ‘a style that would impress even the President’s wife!’ (Figure 3). Group members expressed impatience, asking her to send it ‘right away’. Tina waited another day, though, once again reworking the images in between running errands for elders and cooking. When she finally sent out the style, however, there was no response. She sent three more images later that night when the network is considered more reliable and the connection cheaper. Three group members were online and expressed their wonder via a series of ‘wows’. Congratulatory remarks followed, including clapping-hands emojis as well as requests to copy the style. As followers virtually gathered around the images, attention to the style was reiterated and amplified as transactions of images and text accumulated visual sensations (Brennan Reference Brennan2004). The discussions continued into the night, with group members asking for details about the dress and advice about colour matching or silhouettes – expertise that Tina was excited to share via text, images and even one phone call with an impatient follower. Throughout, she was declared a fashionista, but as she was sending more images and being pestered for the address of her seamstress, her battery ran out. The next day she received three phone calls from people she did not know, each requesting style advice and soliciting images. This reveals how followers act as both target and conduit, further enhancing the fashionista’s influence not only on other members of the group but also on crucial third parties.

Figure 3. A style that a follower of Tina shared further on Tina’s behalf. The style was received by a woman of wealth and status who called Tina for more advice on fashion and style (2016).

Indeed, three members of the ‘Everyday Dress’ group had forwarded Tina’s styles to others outside the group, resulting in these new inquiries. One call came from Ma Elize, whose niece had followed Tina loyally since receiving good advice about a wedding dress. The aunt, who worked as a secretary to a senior executive at a large state-linked firm, called Tina the next day to request images of her styles. Tina immediately showered her with images, fashioning her rights-in-followers and affirming her fashionista name through the volume of images shared. The following week Tina was invited to visit her at her office to showcase another style. As she entered, Ma Elize immediately set aside her work and began to admire the outfit, declaring her desire to copy it. ‘This style,’ she said, clasping her hands in a sign of satisfaction, ‘will keep my husband.’ To further affirm the strength of her digital fashionista name and influence, Tina gave Ma Elize a guided tour through the fashion catalogues she had compiled on her phone, revealing multiple WhatsApp fashion groups, their numerous virtual followers, and her numerous acts of sharing – which might otherwise remain concealed from others. In doing so, she converted the potential that virtual wealth-in-followers constitutes into actual influence on a third party to situate herself within a desirable social network of status and rank. Ma Elize called a colleague over to admire the style, who brought with her two other women, and the group spent several subsequent hours in Ma Elize’s office discussing the styles. By the end of the workday, they had all joined Tina’s digital fashion group.

Through phone calls and images, Ma Elize reported how she had impressed others by wearing Tina’s styles at various events and ceremonies, or gatherings at church. When the company organized a Labour Day celebration at one of the most upmarket hotels in Yaoundé, Tina was invited as the guest of Ma Elize. Most of the women present had travelled to the capital from other cities, and as Tina paraded through the entrance they surrounded her like the photographers who surround stars at galas – to make images of her style with their phones. Iconic virtual images of her styles had coded and circulated her name via digital social networks, and at the event this scaled-up influence was reflected back from an external source: the unknown audience (Munn Reference Munn1986: 116–17) in attendance. Ma Elize had boasted (‘se venter’) to many women that she copied Tina’s styles, and now strangers from Douala and elsewhere knew Tina’s name even before she arrived. They bypassed the other young fashionable women present and pestered her for fashion advice and style images. Now walking a physical red carpet, Tina wore not only her glamorous style but also her name as a renowned fashionistaReference Barber. Actualizing virtual persuasion and transforming it into actual influence on third parties depends on followers sharing one’s images. In the Cameroonian context, where gerontocratic and status relations dominate, it is especially dependent on those with whom images will be shared. Indeed, reaching one or two followers holding positions of status, wealth and/or rank might lead to many new followers, making a fashionista’s name grow rapidly and amplifying her fame. In other words, the value of Tina’s brand, her fashionista name, was contingent on, amplified by and stabilized through Ma Elize’s name – that is, branding a name as a digital fashionista relied on the fashioning of interdependencies (Kopytoff Reference Kopytoff1987).

Towards the end of my fieldwork, Ma Elize helped Tina to get a temporary job. Colleagues soon began gathering around her desk every morning to view her new and unique styles. Requests to join her group exploded, bringing more potential followers. She was requested to design more new styles, answer more calls to deliver expert advice and make and share more images. Tina welcomed these requests – now that the value of her brand had grown, those better-situated followers could, she hoped, potentially make more substantial returns and even bring more followers of wealth, status and rank. If Tina was able to fashion her path through the company to ultimately secure a position, it was because Ma Elize’s acclaim in her own elite circles was contingent on Tina’s style advice. In other words, Tina was also Ma Elize’s wealth-in-people. Ma Elize, in turn, made Tina’s following grow and was proud to mention that she copied Tina’s styles. The value of Tina’s brand was magnified by Ma Elize, whose advertising of the styles won Tina new followers. Yet as Tina pondered why she was not receiving requests from Ma Elize’s elite circles, she warned me about such relations. Tina knew that Ma Elize’s powerful position meant that she had her pick of fashion advisers and could turn easily to another for advice about fashion and styles, and she was also aware that economic decay in Cameroon renders matronage uncertain. While she kept advising Ma Elize, she wondered, for example, how best to share a video on how to wear a recent ‘Michelle Obama’ style. Now looking to diversify her wealth-in-followers as a means to mitigate against Ma Elize’s weakening loyalty, Tina took a risk and privately shared this video advice with another wealthy woman, Ma Laura, whom she had met at the Labour Day event. If Tina was sending such valuable expertise to this new follower, it was precisely because of how her name had grown through the interdependence with Ma Elize. But those more powerful followers also competed for her expert advice on style. The extension of Tina’s appointment at the company depended on Ma Elize. If Ma Elize saw in the group how keen Ma Laura was on Tina’s styles, she might be inclined to secure Tina’s position sooner rather than later, in order, Tina reckoned, to stake a durable claim to Tina’s loyalty. That is, some interdependencies hold the potential to strengthen or weaken others, and vice versa.

Different kinds of interdependencies underpinned possibilities of value creation. Thus, for Tina to reach Ma Elize, it not only required that the married neighbour was satisfied with her fashion advice about wedding dress styles. The neighbour herself had strengthened her affective connection by recommending such a skilful adviser as Tina to her aunt. In the case of Bene, the seamstress’s returns were related to Bene herself recommending her work to followers from another of her digital fashion groups. Meanwhile, despite never being active on Stella’s ‘high fashion’ WhatsApp group, the uncle who offered her pagnes derived affective benefits from presenting Stella’s styles to his wives. For Stella, sharing images with her uncle despite his lack of online activity served to maintain a moral relationship, affirming her own right-in-people, making returns towards the pagnes he had offered her in return for her help on his market stall. As her uncle shared the images with his wives, Stella created belonging among this part of her kin. Indeed, for many young women, sharing images with kin was itself a means of fashioning themselves into kin. For loyal peers from lower socio-economic backgrounds, such WhatsApp groups were their path into the fashion community of a university, neighbourhood, and for some even a city. Thus, followers, like fashionistas, in assessing how to distribute styles – and thus increase someone’s influence – were guided by the actual or future potential affective, social and economic benefits that such sharing might bring. Rather than valuing these relations solely in individual and monetary terms, as is common in social media influencing (e.g. Iquani Reference Iqani2021; Rocamora Reference Rocamora2022), these relations also embraced principles of interdependence, with leaders and followers each seeking to ‘accumulate ties, influence, affection, support, resources, labour and loyalty: wealth-in-people’ (Kusimba Reference Kusimba2021: 8).

Aside from returns in kind, renowned fashionistas such as the Ghanaian hightimers described by Gott (Reference Gott2009) might also receive substantial sums of money – a practice similar to tipping and known as farotage – when they entered an event or ceremony wearing fashionable styles. This was particularly common in the dry season (roughly November–March), when new and unique styles were in demand for life events such as marriages and funerary celebrations (cry-dies). Some described receiving as much as 20,000 to 80,000 FCFA during such events or the equivalent in pagnes from their wealthier followers in return for exclusive advice on crafting their unique styles. Actual benefits varied from drinks and mobile credit, to fabric and regular gifts of money, to offers of temporary employment from wealthier women of status and rank. Importantly, young women often redistributed these rewards to those kin and followers who had demonstrated ‘brand loyalty’ by sharing images of their fashionista’s styles. This took many forms: money, the gifting of part of a pagne, paying a taxi fare or offering a printed image of oneself in a dress from an event, as Tina usually did for her uncle. But as young women’s names grew, others also increased their claims. Tina’s uncle, for example, increasingly made claims for even more images. In the case of Annie, after a Saturday wedding ceremony where her style attracted crowds, on Monday morning peers welcomed her at the university gate with claims for new returns. When possible, young women saved these returns and reinvested them in new and unique styles and new images. If maintaining their name was dependent on the different types of embodied work embedded within these networks of multi-layered relations (Kusimba Reference Kusimba2020), sharing these returns was aimed at making rights-in-followers more durable, to maintain possibilities of value creation and the potential that their virtual influence could again be actualized. In doing so, fashionistas created value in ‘economic, social, affective, individual and collective terms’ (Kusimba Reference Kusimba2021: 8), revealing an alternative to the ‘proprietary organization of attention’ by which micro-celebrities are often fashioned in the digital age (cf. Senft Reference Senft2013).

Other young women established relations of matronage in similar ways. Annie, for example, impressed the secretary at the Ministry of Higher Education while picking up her diploma and added her to a group where she shared fashion advice. In return for sharing her volumes of styles, the secretary not only brought new followers to Annie’s group but also promised to help Annie obtain a teaching position in her preferred district so that she could stay close to her kin. Adelaide developed a relationship with a pharmacist, who, in return for fashion advice, helped obtain a particular medicine for Adelaide’s kin. She also shared styles with a married neighbour in the hopes of reaching the neighbour’s aunt, the boss of a parastatal company. In making women of higher status reliant on them for fashion advice, young fashionistas not only negotiated their positions and bought into networks of matronage but temporarily reversed certain dominant social hierarchies and created matronage around themselves (cf. Röschenthaler Reference Röschenthaler2015). In other words, in the digital age, wealth-in-people reveals the different degrees to which digital leaders and their virtual followers are reciprocally yet unequally each other’s wealth. But as young women invested in followers, it remained uncertain whether and when a relationship might bear fruit, what opportunities it might bring, or how durable followers’ loyalty would be. Thus, if such networks are ‘ways of generating, circulating, distributing, and accumulating wealth-in-people’, ‘ways of surviving, ways of belonging, and ways of getting ahead’ (Kusimba Reference Kusimba2021: 10), they are also young women’s wealth-in-prospects (Johnson-Hanks Reference Johnson-Hanks, Kreager and Bochow2017).

Value in interdependencies

Post-Cold War media and trade liberalization brought cheap mobile phones with cameras as well as cheap textiles, enabling young women to make and share digital images of their fashionable styles. These in turn provided key if uncertain means for young women to ‘compete for attention’ from both peers and women of status and rank (Fuh Reference Fuh2012) so as to fashion avenues of upward social mobility. In order for virtual images to circulate, young women had to compose and rely on a network of kin, peers and strangers, their virtual wealth-in-followers (Guyer and Belinga Reference Guyer and Belinga1995) through whom they could build up their brand name. Many young women aspired to become digital fashionistas, sharing virtual images for themselves and on behalf of others, and concealing sharing across simultaneous WhatsApp group memberships. Thus, as virtual images were shared, it remained uncertain whether an aspiring fashionista’s fame and style would be enhanced as a visual sensory brand (cf. Munn Reference Munn1986; Foster Reference Foster2008). Indeed, digital images were shared further when such sharing offered potential or actual affective, social or economic benefits to followers. I have thus argued that it is through fashioning interdependencies with followers that young women can develop, actualize and amplify their names as digital fashionistas. When matronage relations generated actual upward social mobility, young fashionistas further redistributed the resulting benefits to those followers who had made their name known in the first place, as means of making rights-in-followers more durable, mitigating against uncertain loyalties, affirming the renown of their amplified names and thus securing avenues of value creation. By proposing the interdependencies between fashionable leaders and their followers as sources of value creation, this article offers the broader concept of wealth-in-people as an alternative regime of valuation, acknowledging that social relations are not merely means by which to secure attention, possessions or currency, but rather that virtual images, money or in-kind benefits also serve as means to temporarily accumulate and strengthen multi-layered social relations (Kusimba Reference Kusimba2020).