Re-enchanting sustainable consumption: Cultural intermediaries,charisma,and fashion

Abstract

Cultural intermediaries play an essential role in shaping the ‘moral textures’ of sustainable consumption. Drawing on Bourdieu and Weber’s cultural sociologies of religious personas, this article analyses how cultural intermediaries deploy different charismatic modalities in the field of fashion to advocate for sustainable consumption. Using illustrative methods and media examples, we illuminate how ‘prophetic’ taste influencers, ‘ascetic’ producers of upcycled fashion, ‘priestly’ secondhand clothing recyclers, and ‘mystic’ guides to minimalist lifestyles deploy these ideal-typical charismatic performances to frame, albeit unstable, re-enchanting affinities between the domains of sustainable production, circulation, and consumption. We suggest that via such charisma sustainable fashion consumption gestures towards the formation of neo-confessional identities, further symbolizing the possibility of individual and collective salvation of humanity through an elect group of sustainable consumers. We conclude by proposing a research agenda focused on how the different tensions present in the charisma-sustainability-consumption nexus are best addressed through a cultural sociological framework.

Introduction

Sustainable consumption is a core concern in contemporary studies of consumer culture (Burningham and Venn, 2020; Christensen et al., 2024; Errázuriz et al., 2024; Jacobsen and Hansen, 2021; Martin-Woodhead, 2021; Yates, 2018). This article contributes to this research agenda by bringing underutilized theories from Bourdieu and Weber’s sociology of religion to bear on the cultural intermediation of sustainable fashion consumption. Our aim is to initiate culturally inflected understandings of the sustainability-fashion nexus, while suggesting new departure points for empirical exploration.

Religion frames positivist studies investigating how spiritual belief predisposes actors to sustainable consumption and business (Gutsche, 2019; He et al., 2021; Koehrsen, 2015; Kurenlathi and Salonen, 2018; Minton et al., 2022; Orellano, 2020; Sidibé, 2016), while Weberian analyses of modernity and sustainability draw exclusively on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to foreground secularization, rational calculation, disenchantment, and the domination of the natural world (Buchholz, 1998; Loy, 1997; Gautheir et al., 2016; Yanarella, 2015). What is puzzling is how the orthodox social science and Weberian literature neglects religious charisma, and with it the sociological tradition investigating the ‘production of belief’ (Bourdieu and Nice, 1980). That is, how prophetic energies and charismatic performances intervene to ‘re-enchant’ – or cast a pleasurable magical spell over – sustainable consumption. Moreover, charisma remains a key sociological concept; a ‘compelling description of recognizable social phenomenon’ (Turner, 2003: 8; Collins, 2020; Swedberg and Agevall, 2016). This neglect is even more surprising for Weber (1948: 245) proposes charismatic leaders arise in moments of ‘psychic, physical, economic, ethical, religious, political’ – and here we add environmental – ‘distress’.

We address this oversight by investigating how fashion cultural intermediaries – Bourdieu’s (1984) mediators of appropriate taste, style, and aesthetics – guide sustainable consumption through Weber’s (1948) ideal types of religious charisma: the ‘actual, alleged, or presumed’ power of influence conjured through various forms of performance (Weber, 1978: 467, 295). Bourdieu understands religion in organizational terms, taking the Catholic church as the archetype of religious association with its centralized and hierarchical form of authority (Turner, 2011). This organizational focus means Bourdieu’s sociology of religion follows the Weberian tradition of curating believers ordained through the psychic power of various prophets, priests, and sorcerers, and whose status-markers reflect their creed. This charismatic organization defines the social order, constructs actors’ sense of that order, and shapes practices in congruence with beliefs. Bourdieu also adopts Weber’s theory of charisma as a social relationship and therefore ‘charisma is a source of social transformation, [but] it can only be so when the charismatic message is completely attuned to the dispositions or habitus of disciples and followers’ (Turner, 2011: 233). In our case, fashion cultural intermediaries’ charisma will tend to resonate with social groups endowed with the relative cultural and economic capital, and cognitive schemas, predisposing them to sustainable consumption.

Bourdieu (1993a: 132) further focusses the sustainability, charisma, and fashion nexus by claiming, ‘the sociology of culture is the sociology of religion of our day’. Bourdieu (1984) often describes cultural intermediaries’ charismas when articulating questions of ‘is and ought’ in the selling of un-codified taste and lifestyles, which involves symbolic innovation and cultural competence to create new meanings and consumption practices. Cultural intermediaries therefore engage in an ‘occupational and personal salvation in the imposition of new doctrines of ethical salvation’ using forms of ‘exemplary prophecy’, which involves offering one’s ‘own art of living as an example to others’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 370). In contemporary fashion consumption, cultural intermediaries draw a symbolic energy from the zeitgeist of environmental anxieties to conduct processes of ‘social alchemy’, acting as prophetic guides in the fusion of ethics and aesthetics (Bourdieu, 1993b: 51, 81, 124).

This research is therefore situated in a cultural sociology paradigm. Our interests are in the ‘moral textures’ (Alexander, 2003: 5), performances, and mythologies forming collective representations that indirectly guide and set the cultural tone for sustainable fashion consumption (de la Fuente, 2011: 13) Our theory driven analysis utilizes the illustrative method. Here the ‘researcher applies a theory to a concrete historical situation or social setting or organizes data on the basis of prior theory’ (Neuman, 1991: 421), enabling the interpretation of secondary data through existing concepts (Bonnell, 1980: 165; Goodwin, 2012) that grounds our cultural ‘sociological critique in empirical description of popular controversies’ (Warde, 2017: 165–9). Through theoretically informed desk top research during 2022 we selected media examples of sustainable fashion intermediaries homologous to Weber’s ideal types of religious charisma and who illustrate key activities: online framing, upcycling fashion design, secondhand economies, and minimalist movements. Importantly, ideal types serve as conceptual tools to ‘grasp reality, although it should never be imagined that reality can be derived from them’ (Radkau, 2013: 3). Instead, they amplify salient features of recognizable social phenomenon to act as a heuristic device aiding understanding and further empirical comparison. By aligning ideal types of religious charisma to actual cases we gesture towards the differing modalities through which sustainable consumption becomes ‘re-enchanted’. The usual caveats apply: reduction in social complexity; cultural intermediaries are reified through theorizing; the conceptual categories are fuzzy with slippages in classification; and examples are made to fit the theory when other explanations are available. Despite these limits, our analysis aims to transcend our illustrative exemplars to anticipate charismatic cultural intermediation practices in ‘cases and situations not yet studied’ (Warde, 2022: 25).

The article proceeds as follows. The next section introduces issues in sustainable consumption and fashion clothing. Then Bourdieu’s and Weber’s sociologies of cultural intermediation and charisma are reviewed leading to an illustrative account of the charismatic modalities: promoting sustainable fashion consumption (prophets); producing upcycled fashion (ascetics); selling re-cycled clothing (priests); and guiding minimalist anti-consumption (mystics). When understood as charismatic performance, cultural intermediaries affective labour ‘re-enchants’ sustainable consumption as ‘neo-salvation goods’ for the creator and the consumer alike, potentially symbolizing a stake in interspecies survival. This, however, does not eradicate tensions at the heart of either the institutionalization of charisma or sustainable consumption, but suggests a more extensive research agenda for understanding the moral and aesthetic ‘textures’ involved (see de la Fuente, 2019).

Sustainability, consumption, fashion

Facing well documented industrially induced bio-physical threats, sustainability emerges as a ‘megatrend’ given its endurance over time and depth of its political and policy effects (Prothero and McDonagh, 2015). Yet, this pervasiveness means sustainability is also a broad decentralized movement with no guiding criteria for human action (Salas-Zapata and Ortiz Munoz, 2019). ‘Sustainable consumption’ then emerges as an ideological container for contemporary market consumerism, encompassing environmental awareness, ethical consumption, brand management, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Welch (2020) describes this constellation as the ‘teloaffective’ frame of ‘promotional sustainable consumption’: a normative ordering of consumer engagement and desire, a moral responsibility offering consumers ‘salvation’, and the symbolic delineation consumption practices.

Such environmental concern leads to research on household consumption, recycling, and waste reduction practices (Liu et al., 2017). Yet, this focus on consumer sovereignty and materiality (Miller, 1997) confronts social actors’ attitude-behavior gap, exacerbated by modern time pressures (Young et al., 2010) and existing energy infrastructures (Klinenberg et al., 2020). Consequently, a focal point is understanding consumer practices (Welch and Warde, 2015) and the organization of time and consumption (Warde, 2005). These studies foreground how actors frame and practice sustainable consumption, and their human/non-human interactions (e.g., Shove, 2012). One influential strand of practice research is to inform policies encouraging ‘ecological citizenship’ where everyday consumption is governmemtalised into waste minimization (Spaargaren, 2020; Spaargaren and Oosterveer, 2010). More recently, social justice concerns via intersectionality, diversity, inclusion, ‘whiteness’, and ecofeminism are deployed to address the sustainability agenda’s silences and assumptions (MacGregor, 2020; MacGregor et al., 2019). There is also emerging research considering how ethical, organic, minimalist, and recycling trends transpose consumption into sustainability inflected affective registers (e.g., Eden, 2017; Soper, 2007; Vannini and Taggart, 2016), and how life events may incite these practices (Hüttel and Balderjahn, 2022). Overall, sustainable consumption ‘effect(s) a shift of emphasis from style and status to virtue and political rectitude’ (Warde, 2022: 24).

Bourdieusians problematize the materialist, practice, and justice positions by accentuating how actors’ socialized subjectivities guide consumption (Jacobsen and Hansen, 2021; Kennedy et al., 2015). This transforms sustainable consumption from an ethical and collective concern into a ‘distinction’ where actors frame sustainable consumption as a status marker or ‘salve’ to allay existential fears, rather than generating environmental benefits (Elliot, 2013). This position resonates with the critique of sustainability agendas as ‘woke washing’ under the banner of CSR and ‘Purposeful Brands’ (Humphery, 2010; Miller, 2017; Vredenburg et al., 2020). Tracking closer to the Bourdieusian consumer, an actor’s greater holding of economic and cultural capital (education credentials, knowledge of wider material and embodied symbols) leads to dispositions favoring sustainability (Atkinson, 2022). Atkinson (2022) also identifies those actors located in dominated positions of the dominated factions of modern societies - or the youthful intermediate social positions - embody ethical dispositions favoring vegetarianism, locally sourced food, sustainable fashion, and the affordable and durable such as well-made clothing and minimizing waste as a savings strategy.

Fashion clothing is interwoven with these sustainability concerns (Forti et al., 2020; Hobson, 2013). Since the 1990s the fashion industry has faced public scrutiny over landfill, exploitive North/South labour relations, weak pollution regulations across global commodity chains, and the rapid generation of postconsumer waste streams (Bonelli et al., 2024; Brans, 2023). In the last two decades, ‘fast fashion’ doubled production with the average global annual consumption rising from 7 to 13 kg, while more than two thirds of the textiles end up in landfill (Shirvanimoghaddam et al., 2020). These problematics sees new business models emerge to sustain recycling, sharing, and rentals that mitigate fashion garment life cycles (Amasawa et al., 2023). Yet, addressing environmental impacts during production reveals durable tensions. Management understands sustainability in win-win terms: waste reduction as efficiency and CSR. Designers in contrast advance a counter ethic seeking to promote durability, garment life cycles, and a ‘maker’ ethic of the hand-made and unique (Thomas, 2020; Thorisdottir and Johannsdottir, 2020). Working across the tensions of sustainability, consumption, and style, leads to cultural intermediaries.

Cultural intermediaries and charisma

Cultural intermediaries promoting ‘sustainable fashion’ are our key illustrative examples for they play a significant role in consumer culture and the ‘micro-entrepreneurial’ (McRobbie, 2018: 99) ‘sectors in modern capitalism catering to consumer demands for amusement, ornamentation, self-affirmation, [and] social display …’ (Scott, 1999: 807; Scott, 2017; Scott and Szili, 2018). Operating within, and reproducing, the established neoliberal institutions of consumer sovereignty and choice, entrepreneurial action, and market exchange these figures:

• Act as co-producers, gatekeepers, brokers, tastemakers, and curators (Bourdieu, 1984).

• Spin the ‘webs of cultural meaning, which cast the symbolic sources for individual choice’ (Warde, 2014: 273).

• Expertly ‘construct value, by framing how others engage with … services, ideas, and behaviors [to] impact on notions of what, and thereby who, is legitimate, desirable, and worthy’ (Macguire and Matthews, 2012: 551).

• ‘Communicate a range of non-economic values, including social and environmental sustainability’ (Hracs et al., 2021: 9).

• Produce ‘surprising and enjoyable sensuous and emotional experiences…[and] must develop a sensibility for the aesthetic needs of their customers’ (Reckwitz, 2017: 90-91).

Cultural intermediaries consequently advocate for sustainable consumption using novel forms of social relations and narratives enabling consumers ‘access to a [new]moral and aesthetic universe’ (Huggard, et al., 2023: 556), with sustainable fashion ethics often guided via ‘influencers’ online performances (Marcella-Hood, 2023; Mesiranta et al., 2021). Yet there are frictions when promoting sustainable adornment, with Clark (2008) arguing sustainable fashion is an oxymoron. To negotiate these tensions, fashion websites such as Gloop deploy sustainability discourse to critique consumption and to promote enlightened modes of consuming (Colucci and Pedroni, 2022). Consequently, cultural intermediation traverses the politicized ethics of sustainability (Cronin and Edwards, 2022), inducing oppositions between intermediaries’ personal values and market imperatives (Rottinghaus, 2024).

Discussing cultural intermediaries in contemporary forms of sustainable fashion consumption therefore requires additional cultural understandings. In the discursive arc and ‘structure of feeling’ – rather than epoch in any historicist or linear sense – from Currid’s (2007) The Warhol Economy to Baker and Rojek’s (2020) Lifestyle Gurus - the role of creator, tastemaker, critic, trendspotter, collector, curator of styles, etc., is increasingly blurred. The rich world of cultural intermediation seems poised between the opposing modernist forces of differentiation and de-differentiation, inspiration and routinization, autonomy and heteronomy, aestheticization and commercialization, between niche things and mainstream things, and between processes of inter-mediation and dis-mediation (i.e., if print and broadcast media concentrated taste curation, then social media renders taste-making de-centred and potentially bottom-up). Also of direct relevance to our topic, bohemians, avant-gardists and counter-culturalists were early adopters of sustainable fashion, finding value in discarded clothing in flea markets and specialist secondhand clothing stores (Wilson, 2000). Here recycled and sustainable fashions lend themselves to being mobilized in what Gregson and Crewe (2003: 143) term ‘transformative practices in time and space’; sustainable consumption opens-up the possibility of commodity ‘recovery’, ‘redefinition’, ‘divestment’ and ‘re-enchantment’. Goods can be transformed through ‘possession rituals’ involving active recreation of objects and being able to spot uniqueness (‘knowingness’), through to ‘cleansing rituals’ and the interweaving of the ‘imagined histories’ of the self and object (Gregson and Crewe, 2003: 143-172). Linking sustainable consumption to cultural intermediaries’ charisma ranges from sustainability practices involving the magical transformation of objects through to such creativity being performed via different types of charismatic ‘persona’.

In History of Charisma, Potts (2009: 5) explains charisma originally denoted ‘miraculous spiritual powers ranging from prophecy to healing and speaking in tongues’. Despite its ancient and religious provenance and a plethora of new terms - ‘glamour’, ‘fame’, ‘prestige’, ‘aura’ and ‘celebrity’ - charisma remains a necessary concept to capture an ‘“X-factor” quality [that] distinguishes it from these and other commonly used words’ (Potts, 2009: 5). When it comes to consumption – be it luxury or secondhand goods – charisma is something requiring ‘assembling’ (Dion and Arnould, 2011). Therefore, the ‘current meaning of charisma has been molded by the flux of social, economic and technological factors informing … media-saturated cultures …’ (Potts, 2009: 215) with charismatic qualities residing in individuals (i.e., producers, consumers, intermediaries), communities (subcultures, aesthetic tribes, consumer types), or in the objects themselves (i.e., in goods that seem to have an ‘it’ factor). Accordingly, over the last hundred years charisma has oscillated between ‘maximalist’ and ‘minimalist’ versions. The latter resonates with Weber’s ‘exemplary prophet’ (more on this below) and Lasch’s (1984) ‘minimal self’, evincing an elective affinity with cultures of sustainable consumption. This is part of the ‘aestheticization of selfhood that modernity has produced’ and responds to the types of ‘charismatic empowerment’ or leadership repertoires associated with dandyism and more recently ‘cool’ (de la Fuente, 2011: 133-134; Brown, 2021; Pountain and Robbins, 2000). As Sennett (1977: 270; 269) suggests, modern charisma can be ‘titanic, heroic’ but it can also be ‘warm, homey and sweet’, making the point that in the electronic media age charismatic influence is heightened through the cultural intermediary controlling ‘process[es] of self-disclosure’. From Warhol through to YouTube influencers (see Cocker and Cronin, 2017), charisma is now often more muted, more overtly about surface than depth, and more reliant on how publics, fans, and audiences respond to displays of charismatic power. A charisma that continuously hectors or engages in admonition is less likely to work when attempting to get people to shift their consumption habits.

To invoke the ethics of sustainable consumption, charismatic figures are significant. They illustrate a path to personal salvation via commendable living and by enacting personal qualities towards a valued end that demonstrates ‘a salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism’ (Weber, 1948: 285, 342). Cultural intermediaries’ charisma thus ‘re-enchants’ sustainable consumption to ease the psychic burdens of late capitalism’s waste and correlated dissipating wellbeing. By providing framings within the market-oriented institutionalization of sustainable consumption, our fashion exemplars act as vessels originating new ways of living as a means of salvation with sustainability principles acting to signify this worldly self-control and an ethical self-discipline. How then might beliefs and dispositions towards sustainable fashion consumption be nurtured? We advocate for a shift from the world of disenchanted rational calculation, bureaucratic policy guides, and the governmental mastery of waste and energy dominating sustainability debates to the role of cultural intermediaries in shaping the ‘moral textures’ of sustainable fashion. We propose a cultural sociology of charismatic modalities emphasizing how re-enchantment is performed within specific cultural worlds and sites of consumption.

Charismatic modalities and sustainable fashion intermediaries

In adapting a cultural sociology of charismatic modalities to match the types of performative roles emerging in contemporary sustainable fashion, we feel it is necessary to extend Bourdieu’s adoption of Weber’s model of charismatic guides by returning to the latter’s original ideal types of prophet, ascetic, mystic and priest. It pays to reiterate that Weber’s (1948: 267-301; 323-359) ‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’ and ‘Religious rejections of the World and their Directions’ were conceived during a period when the author was an institutional and cultural outsider, spending time ‘convalesc[ing] in Italy’ and temporarily residing in the Ascona community that included Else and ‘Frieda Von Richtofen, who was married to D.H. Lawrence’, as well as the pacifist, free-love, ‘libertarian psychoanalyst Dr Otto Gross’ (Whimster, 2004: 8). This highlights that when Weber was teasing out a sociology of religious and charismatic types and discussing tensions between ‘this-worldly’ (e.g., Puritanism, rationalism, disenchantment, capitalism, bureaucracy, etc.) and ‘other-worldly’ ethics (charisma, prophecy, mysticism, aestheticism, eroticism, intellectualism, etc.), he had been associating with an assortment of pacifists, vegetarians, political radicals, and cultural modernists (Radkau, 2013). As such, when Weber (1948: 288ff) is investigating whether alternatives to capitalism and rationalism are open to the secular equivalent of a religious ‘virtuosi’ or ‘laity’ and does this cause promoters of such ethics to ‘flee’ the world or lead to ‘practical everyday’ solutions, he had first-hand experience of such dilemmas. But we can see why some might worry that understanding sustainability as a Bourdieusian aesthetic-cum-moral strategy can be seen as emphasizing individualism over what Weber (1948: 348) calls the ‘religious ethic of brotherhood’. But to couch this metaphorically, existential threats can have people either seeking to steady and save the ‘ship’ or select members heading for their own individual ‘lifeboats’. Here charismatic modalities act as guides to sustainable fashion and earthly salvation.

The prophet: Consumption influencers

Weber’s (1948: 262) prophet is the maximalist ideal type of ‘genuine charisma’ inspiring social change for it does not appeal to ‘an enacted or traditional order, nor does it base its claims on acquired right’. Instead, the prophet appears as an active tool of the ‘god(s)’ and undertakes a divine mission. This sense of mission leads to a permanent state of tension with the world, such as current conditions of environmental destruction under late capitalism. Consequently, the prophet’s life and those of their followers are set in a constant state of restlessness and dissatisfaction with the world as it stands, leading to demands that the world needs to be transformed into the prophet’s visions (de la Fuente, 2011: 91).

The cultural intermediary as prophet amplifies consumption ills and proposes new ways of living as a means of worldly salvation. With the rise of social media platforms prophetic declarations regarding sustainable and slow fashion movements have proliferated. Podcaster, fair fashion campaigner, and sustainable fashion influencer, Venetia La Manna is a prime example of how being a “digital prophet” is one avenue of agitating for sustainable change in the industry. As co-founder of the hashtag Remember Who Made Them, her vision was borne from a dissatisfaction with the fashion industry’s social and environmental transgressions. Her podcast All the Small Things has amassed over 2 million downloads, through which La Manna reaffirms a ‘divine mission’ to constantly discredit fast fashion brands publicly, claiming her righteousness to her followers: ‘I choose how I use my voice and what work I say yes and no to … It is important for me to say that I do have layers of privilege that allow me to shop in line with my ethics, but as individuals, there [is] lots … we can do’ (Proudfoot, 2020).

Melbourne based fashion designer Courtney Holm further illustrates how prophets make prognoses and agitate solutions to the ‘fast fashion detox’ (Ruppert-Stroescu et al., 2015). Her micro-label A.BCH and public advocacy work on circular economies echoes other eco-fashion leaders in London (Katherine Hamnett, Christopher Raeburn), Berlin (Hannan Kromminga), and Paris (Yuima Nakazato). As she observes, ‘The current (fashion) system is a mess. I couldn’t bear to be a part of that mess unless I was doing something radically different to change it. This is why A.BCH exists’ (Cocktail Revolution, 2022). Expressing this quasi-divine mission Holm recounts her transformation into a vessel for sustainability; ‘One day I realized I wanted to be a fashion designer and that I wanted to use it to change the world for the better’ (The Cool Career, n.d.). This mission guides the restless action she undertakes: ‘I hate to sound extreme, but there’s going to come a point – maybe not in the peak of my career, but maybe my children’s – where resources will run out. I really, truly believe that there will eventually be no other option than for people to become a part of the circular economy, which begins and ends with recycling’ (Bank Australia, 2018). With the risk parameters of current fashion consumption articulated, prophecy can lead to ‘the possession of the deity (authors: Gaia?) and the inward contemplative surrender to God’ (Weber, 1948: 285). Such possession requires action and proof of the prophets’ skills. For fashion cultural intermediaries this can be demonstrated through methodical sustainable production.

The ascetic: Upcycled fashion designers

The ascetic is a religious persona called to work in the world as a vocation and acts as the austere abstainer for spiritual benefit (Weber, 1948: 325-26). This charisma is not in flight from or struggle with the world as it stands, but proves their social honor through everyday action in a calling as the secularized figure of Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis. Rather than monastic removal, the ascetic acts in the world, demanding a self-righteous belief to indulge in the impure ways of society. Thus, the ascetic’s charisma is more muted, being a figure of self-disciplined repression and non-spontaneity (de la Fuente, 2011). However, they can act as agents of revolutionary change through work on the material world as a transformative process of salvation. Notably, asceticism demands obeying ‘good’ (here, sustainability) to purify the soul of others (Weber, 1948: 340).

Our illustrative example of ascetic charisma is the upcycling of denim and the rehabilitation of waste into bespoke fashion items, signaling purification work on the soul of the intermediary and the salvation of the consumer through sustainable consumption choices. Here the cultural intermediary turns material with little value into marketable, materialized cultural capital. Indicative examples are the Glaswegian micro-fashion designers Elizaveta and Narew Bennett’s ‘Arkdefo’ and Siobahn McKenna’s ‘ReJean’ (Devereux Taylor, 2019; Marland, 2021). After scouring charity and secondhand stores to select items for redesigning, these raw materials are meticulously transformed into one off urban fashons – jackets, trousers, shirts, dresses - playing on the cultural ubiquity of denim (Miller and Woodward, 2007). This exemplary production then situates upcycled denim within an overarching ethos of future oriented circular economies, sustainability, and inclusivity.

Ascetic charisma, by working methodically on the material world in a transformative process, heralds cultural intermediaries’ capacity to purify the souls of others by transforming consumption into unique salvation goods based on both ‘good works’ and ‘good consumption’ (Weber, 1948: 340). As Weber (1948: 326) notes, ascetic labour ‘in the world’ externally ‘accommodates’ to its orders’ such as the imperatives of market exchange, ‘but only in order to gain a certainty of {their} state of grace in opposition to the world by resisting the temptation to take the world seriously’. Through fashion re- and upcycling, ascetics rephrase a material past to project an ‘re-enchanted’ future that is respectful of accumulated cultural knowledge. They guarantee an aesthetic deliverance from the sufferings of kitsch mass production and ‘fast-fashion’ via the signifiers of sustainable, local, quality, and durability. Yet, sustainable fashion is not only about ethical production but also how everyday consumption decisions are guided.

The priest: Curating secondhand fashion

Weber’s (1968: 29) priest ideal type values stable professional action and following fixed doctrine. The priest’s power stems from the legitimate performance of traditional practices that guide and reaffirm existing codes of conduct (de la Fuente, 2011). The priest is therefore ‘the unwitting by-product of formulated doctrines and pastoral exhortations, [and] of conventions and reciprocal expectations in the congregation’ (Bendix, 1977: 273). Within the institutionalization of sustainable fashion, priestly charisma is often found in the sphere of recycling, thrift stores, and re-selling across market niches.

Fashion recycling extols the sustainability mantra of ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ with this ethic increasingly embedded in circular economy narratives. In this context, cultural intermediaries act to continuously redefine the relationship between ‘used’ and ‘new to you’ by framing second-hand purchases as stylish waste minimization (Baker, 2012). Illustrative statements of how intermediaries specializing in sourcing and selling re-cycled fashion re-enchant consumer sentiment include: ‘Thrifting is so important to combating fast fashion. There’s a treasure trove of stuff you’ll love in great condition at a great price if you only go looking online or in person’. And ‘save money, look cool, go green’ (Wurthmann, n.d.), or ‘Practical tips to kick-start your reused apparel lifestyle’ (f. vintage, n.d.). Within these online exhortations and associated images are often sets of transactional information on where to shop.

This priestly charisma as a mode of pastoral guidance to followers of sustainable fashion may be expressed in person through the careful (co)selection of fashion items (be this high-end recycling to ‘knowing’ outfitting) or displayed via social media. Through this curation the priest acts as guide, tastemaker, selector/buyer, and para-social collective decision maker with the consumer (Hancock, 2019). By directing, and re-enchanting, recycled fashion consumption the priest transmits the ‘fountainhead of moral ideas that shape … conduct’ (Bendix, 1977: 260). In this role, the priest offers few surprises when distilling and conveying sustainability doctrine into everyday fashion for a community of followers predisposed to sustainability ethics. These intermediaries then emerge as a subordinate but ‘cool’ and more numerous fashion cadre who, like religious priests, tend to a congregation through ‘control of regular conduct [which] first falls into the hands of the charismatically qualified successors, pupils, disciples’ (Weber, 1948: 262). Conversely, non-consumption and minimization is also imbued with sustainability principles (Martin-Woodhead, 2021; Meissner, 2019).

The mystic: Exemplary minimalism

In contrast to acting as an emissary of the Gods through proselytizing, action or displaying sustainability doctrine, the mystic’s charisma is characterized by the ‘possession of the deity or the inward and contemplative surrender to God’ (Weber, 1948: 325). As a disposition, the mystic inclines towards minimal activity; there is no point in stating your view for there is no need to fight an unknowable world or a world that cannot be mastered (de la Fuente, 2011). Instead, this muted charisma draws more on showing commendable ways of living – through exemplary prophecy – than evangelizing.

Fueled by financialized debt overconsumption has led to the accumulation of unused household items, with these idle possessions claimed to carry a magical contagion effect, slowing individual responsiveness to changing life opportunities. Under Simmel’s (1997) tragedy of culture, the significance actors attach to possessions creates a psychic barrier to meaningful social relationships and experiences, burdening the soul with anxiety and depression (Sandlin and Wallin, 2022). The minimalist movement is a response, advocating for ascetic ‘salvation’ consumption including strictures on clothing (e.g., 14 items maximum), diets for planetary salvation (veganism and claims to human vegetarian histories), and bodily wellness guides to tame anxieties (Chayka, 2020)

Emerging from Japanese media appearances, sociology graduate Marie Kondo illustrates the sacrificial rites of decluttering and minimized consumption (Durkheim, 2016). Following a religious epiphany based on an obsession with throwing away personal items, Kondo developed a method of ‘aestheticized restraint’ that promises the magical decoupling of possessions from self-identity to render the material world indifferent on her followers (Khamis, 2019). By ritualized sorting, re-organizing, and removing objects (mostly clothing) from the consumerist house that do not ’spark joy’, decluttering practices ‘re-enchant’ consumption choices; disciplined non-consumption – the mystical minimization of action for salvation – becomes a form of cultural consumption.

Kondo’s persona illustrates how sustainable fashion cultural intermediaries perform the charisma of the mystic. Weber (1948: 285) identifies this mode of exemplary action as an ‘apathetic ecstasy’, which has an elective affinity with Oriental religions such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism. Here the human creature must be silent so God can speak (or for Kondo ‘spark joy’), leading to an internal world of contemplation performed through a ‘broken humility, a minimization of action, a sort of religious incognito experience’ (Weber, 1948: 326). This leads to indolence and indifference to the world of consumption. Therefore, the sustainable fashion intermediary as mystic is promoting a sacrificial benevolence, an ‘objectless devolution to anybody, not for man’s [sic] sake but purely for devotion’s sake’ (Weber, 1948: 333), transforming decluttering into an ecstatic purification ritual and an exemplary decoupling of the self from possessions. Notably, Kondo’s charisma is now reproduced through an urban cadre of priestly entrepreneurs offering decluttering services and who promote the idea of renunciation through active ‘disinvestment’ of the self and its accumulated material histories (Gregson and Crewe, 2003).

Concluding remarks: Charisma, sustainability, and cultural sociology’s ongoing role in the analysis of consumer cultures

A durable criticism of charisma is that it constitutes a residual concept - a Deus Ex Machina - which accounts for social power when other more material or social network explanations are lacking (Turner, 2003). A related criticism is charisma often overstates the demands for obedience placed on followers (Mommsen, 1974: 92-93). Nevertheless, our illustrative approach has not been concerned with any causality measures nor in adjudicating the direct or indirect influence intermediaries wield over followers. We have simply sought to elucidate how certain modes of charismatic performance are woven across the wider ‘moral textures’ of sustainable fashion consumption. Drawing on Bourdieu and Weber’s cultural sociologies of meaning-making and action in the religious field, we have suggested how intermediaries’ charisma is a significant component in building and reproducing visibly demarcated taste communities exploring sustainability (Schultheis, 2008: 45-46). The intermediaries in question are situated within the secular sanctity of sustainability discourse from which they define and routinise a market niche for potential consumers; consumers who, in turn, then selectively maintain ‘the form of the prophets teaching which is most appropriate for them’ (Weber, 1978: 467). Here cultural intermediaries’ charisma serves to performatively ‘re-enchant’ or make magical everyday consumption beyond the sphere of disenchanted calculation (Schultheis, 2008: 37). But we have left open the question of whether sustainability as neo-salvation strategy is a re-enchantment of what had been disenchanted (i.e., the kind of master narrative one finds in Weber’s Protestant Ethic and sociologies of late-modern sustainability); or is a case of differential enchantment strategies within consumer worlds that had never fully lost their ‘magic’ (i.e., a position closer to Weber’s religious ‘intermediate reflections’).

What we do strongly suggest, however, is that the cultural sociology of charismatic modalities offers new inflection points on intermediaries and sustainable consumption centered around culture, consumption, and practices of the self (on the part of both intermediaries and consumers). This kind of research agenda we feel is needed to explore the symbolic production of neo-salvation goods, as well as dialectical processes of routinization and re-enchantment within sustainable consumer cultures (Swedberg and Agevall, 2016: 238). We have proposed cultural intermediaries’ charisma is significant for setting ‘the tone of social relations by their ideas and style of life’ (Bendix, 1977: 264). Rather than necessarily leading to blind obedience on the part of followers, the kinds of charisma on display may simply alter followers’ ‘risk perceptions [as] action is a more fundamental mechanism than interdiction’ (Turner, 2003: 19). Pushing this line of analysis further may imply interpreting sustainable fashion as a religious creed, casting an aura or mana of spiritual force over those consumers with the cultural capital required to interpret such codes (Smith, 2000). Perhaps a sacred power of environmental redemption becomes manifest in physical objects or practices, either through ‘good’ works (working on sustainable consumption practices such as upcycled or ethical fashions, aided by cultural intermediaries’ directions), ascetic restraint (minimalist re-cycled wardrobes and plant-based diets), or ecstatic ritual (the emotional purification of decluttering; the thrill of thrift store finds) (Swedberg and Agevall, 2016). What remains less clear (and would require much more empirical investigation) is whether the charismatic intermediation of sustainable consumption gestures towards, on the one hand, the collective salvation of humanity by via an elect group of consumers or if cultural intermediaries can genuinely mobilize a more expansive, grassroots, and decentered model of planetary salvation.

The presence of such tensions and paradoxes, ones that are at least as old as modernity and perhaps as old as specialized symbolic activity, is even more reason to deploy the type of cultural sociology of charisma and consumption we are advocating for. Because, whether we are speaking of Weber and Bourdieu’s religious ‘virtuosi’ or contemporary intermediaries acting via online media or in person, the tensions are remarkably similar. They involve claims to ‘newness’ and ‘tradition’, ‘outsiderism’ and what is ‘mainstream’ or ‘institution-bound’, between authority that resides in ‘individuals’ and ‘select groups’ or in practices that are open to everybody. Perhaps, such tensions are inevitable when the encoding of cultural practices either explicitly or implicitly evokes the logics of sacred and profane, this-worldly and other-worldly. However, rather than simply deride the trappings of charisma and the ‘sprinkle dust’ of re-enchantment as inferior to rational policy or legal frameworks, we feel it necessary to explore the kind of charisma-sustainability-consumption nexus outlined in our article. We understand species survival may seem too important a topic to be governed by the vagaries of intermediaries’ charisma, their weak forms of authority, and the incessant taboos-cum-‘oughts’ of consumer cultures. But in an age where governments are paying influencers to attend cultural events to maximize city, political party, or national ‘brand value’, there is even more reason for cultural sociologists and allied researchers to investigate the nexus between charisma, consumption, and planetary survival.