The Commodification of Wellness

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.