This book critically analyses and documents a shift of ethical consumption patterns through Western yoga commodities, services and transformational experiences that affect women within consumer culture. Western yoga uses fashion and luxury branding strategies to promote commodities that support an individualised, exclusive, and privatised quest for meaning, ritual, belonging and community. These new status signifiers demonstrate how Western yoga has become an essential contemporary sign and symbol of the aspirational class. This book thus discusses how aspirational Western yoga brands, yoga studios, and social media influencers commodify wellness by distributing cultural capital as postfeminist spiritual capital through the promotion of exclusive and consciously-minded aesthetic and ethical transformational experiences within the wellness industry.
Through the contemporary case studies presented in this book, the reader will be exposed to the complex tactics that yoga brands, yoga studios and ‘yogalebrities’ use to generate aspirational conscious luxury commodities that promise entangled physical and spiritual distinction. This book reveals how yoga practitioners are encouraged to arrive at self-optimisation and self-empowerment not after the trials and tribulations of the human experience but after a highly controlled and exclusive experiential economic transaction that anchors the ego to bodily labour and elitist luxury fashion design ideals. These case studies will expose the reader to how these new consumption patterns converge, stylising and commodifying the psychic life of women.
This book will appeal to an academic audience with an interest in fashion and luxury studies, luxury management, consumer culture, gender studies and critical spiritual practices.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Western Yoga, Good Taste and Good Morals 2. Ethical Luxury Consumption: Luxury Wellness and Spiritual Capital 3. Spiritual Bricolage: The Entanglement of Spirituality, Morality and Sustainability 4. Aspirational Yogawear: Yogalebrities and the Disciplining of the Idealised Body 5. Yoga Studios: Transformational Luxury Brand Experiences and the White Cube 6. Conclusion: Queering the Wellness Industry, Bad Taste and Bad Morals
About the Author :
Juliana Luna Mora is an early career researcher and lecturer at the RMIT School of Fashion and Textiles, Australia. Juliana works at the intersection of critical luxury and fashion, embodied practice and consumer culture. Juliana specifically looks into ethical luxury consumption products, body-mind practices and spiritual lifestyles and experiences. Through her research, Juliana aims to support a more just and inclusive society.
Review :
'In her meticulously researched The Commodification of Wellness, Juliana Luna Mora offers a vibrant and much-needed critical account of Western Yoga as luxury lifestyle in contemporary consumer culture. This is a very welcome contribution to fashion studies that will also no doubt be of interest to scholars and students of consumer culture, luxury, capitalism and celebrity culture.'
- Professor Agnès Rocamora, Professor of Social and Cultural Studies, University of the Arts, London.
'The Commodification of Wellness: Conscious Luxury, Western Yoga and Fashion is the first scholarly study to understand the practice of yoga and its associated products as luxury commodities. Drawing together theories of cultural capital, ethical consumption discourse and postfeminist frameworks, Luna Mora provides a provocative analysis of how the yoga industry mediates bodies, minds and spirits through neoliberal consumption tactics. The book is replete with informative brand case studies that detail how yogawear, celebrity influencers, social media platforms, multi-sensory design and unique spatial experiences converge, foregrounding how the wellness industry has stylised and commodified the ‘psychic life’ of women consumers. This timely book critically appraises the entanglement of spirituality and sustainability within luxury brand management to reveal how so-called ethical consumption practices are morally paradoxical, raising important questions about how wellness is marketed according to gender, race and class dynamics.'
- Associate Professor Jess Berry, Monash University, Australia.
