Through essays that critically engage with fan participation within consumer, material, and brand cultures, Acquiring Fan Lifestyles explores how fandom is increasingly imagined by brand owners and consumers as a lifestyle. The authors highlight a range of often overlooked fan practices and sites of engagement, including home decor, health and wellness, sustainable fashion, luxury goods, and other lifestyle categories, looking to brands such as Target and Ruggable as well as fandoms such as Twin Peaks and LEGO. They examine how individuals who claim the identity of “fan” engage in acquisition practices that are intended to demonstrate said fandom, as well as how individuals come to discover their fandoms through acquisition. In so doing, they seek to complicate the ways people participate in fandoms via acquisition; practices that are neither inauthentic nor co-opted, but rather blur the boundaries between fandom as subculture and fandom as lifestyle. Acquiring Fan Lifestyles takes seriously what acquisition and lifestyle affords fandoms and fan agency, decision making, and labor without dismissing the possibility of fan activity being constrained by and reshaped within market and class-based ideologies.

Point of Sale offers the first significant attempt to center media retail as a vital component in the study of popular culture.  It brings together fifteen essays by top media scholars with their fingers on the pulse of both the changes that foreground retail in a digital age and the history that has made retail a fundamental part of the culture industries.  The book reveals why retail matters as a site of transactional significance to industries as well as a crucial locus of meaning and interactional participation for consumers. In addition to examining how industries connect books, DVDs, video games, lifestyle products, toys, and more to consumers, it also interrogates the changes in media circulation driven by the collision of digital platforms with existing retail institutions.  By grappling with the contexts in which we buy media, Point of Sale uncovers the underlying tensions that define the contemporary culture industries. 
 

In recent years, geeks have become chic, and the fashion and beauty industries have responded to this trend with a plethora of fashion-forward merchandise aimed at the increasingly lucrative fan demographic. This mainstreaming of fan identity is reflected in the glut of pop culture T-shirts lining the aisles of big box retailers as well as the proliferation of fan-focused lifestyle brands and digital retailers over the past decade. While fashion and beauty have long been integrated into the media industry with tie-in lines, franchise products, and other forms of merchandise, there has been limited study of fans’ relationship to these items and industries.  

Sartorial Fandom shines a spotlight on the fashion and beauty cultures that undergird fandoms, considering the retailers, branded products, and fan-made objects that serve as forms of identity expression.  This collection is invested in the subcultural and mainstream expression of style and in the spaces where the two intersect. Fan culture is, in many respects, an optimal space to situate a study of style because fandom itself is often situated between the subcultural and the mainstream. Collectively, the chapters in this anthology explore how various axes of lived identity interact with a growing movement to consider fandom as a lifestyle category, ultimately contending that sartorial practices are central to fan expression but also indicative of the primacy of fandom in contemporary taste cultures.