As a result of their experiment, the researchers found out that a past-themed consumption can create (re-)enchantment by eliciting different kinds of nostalgia, as explained in the following lines. According to Badot and Filser, who are cited in the same article, markets absolve an important role in this process, allowing to incorporate non-functional sources of value in goods and services and turning them into sources of hedonic, symbolic, and interpersonal value. This "(re-)enchantment", at the base of the previously described modern hedonism, is described as the "recovery of utopian, romantic, mythical, emotional, and imaginary elements of the relationship consumers have with the world". Nostalgia and Consumption: reluctant, progressive, playful Īccording to the Hartmann and Brunk’s article Nostalgia marketing and (re-)enchantment, it might be stated that we are nowadays dealing with a re-establishment of enchantment, a way to escape from ordinary and rationalized life in order to recuperate the hedonism of life. This new dimension of consumption is enriched by a "modern hedonism", described by Campbell as a private state of the mind through which goods become the results of human creativity and fantasy. This dualistic vision is still present in contemporary societies, even if today these two elements seem to coexist: patina has been recuperated in simulated forms, created through mass-production, such as artificially aged items. It is somehow opposed to the definition of fashion given by Georg Simmel, focused on an individualistic emphasis of the present and its newness. Patina įrom a sociological point of view, the anthropologist Grant McCracken (1988) talks about the patina of time as the value that objects gain with the flow of time: it is strictly related to the family, as the action of passing down an object through different generations, and it poses its emphasis on the past. Anyway, this nostalgia could turn into a utopian vision of the past since "an individual's idealized perception of it automatically erases any negative traces". Nowadays, the most iconic nostalgia is the one that comes from the early 2000s. Īs far as the consuming dimension is concerned, it might be said that the first level proposed by Davis helps us in understanding how consumed nostalgia has always achieved excellent results in various markets from the 1900s: generations usually experience this feeling for an epoch before its own of about twenty years. At the second level, the individual starts raising questions concerning the truth of the nostalgic claim, then entering in the third one by going beyond the issues of historical accuracy into a deeper analysis. The first one is based on the belief that "things were better in the past". As explained in the article Media, Memory and Nostalgia in Contemporary France: Between Commemoration, Memorialisation, Reflection and Restoration, one of the first important sociologists who studied nostalgia, Fred Davis (1979), divided the nostalgic experience into three different levels: simple, reflexive and interpreted. The origins of consumed nostalgia date back to the second half of the twentieth century. As reported by Sassatelli in the book Consumer Culture, "the value of things depends on the value they are given by the subject, rather than being founded on absolutes". Indeed, consumers enrol themselves in a new kind of activity, transforming goods into personal objects through an active work of symbolisation. It could be said that, through their everyday consumption, goods acquire new meanings in relation to the way consumers use and perceive them. Nostalgia consumption is a social and cultural trend that could be described as the act of consuming goods that elicit memories from the past, being associated with the feeling of nostalgia.
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