Edinburgh Napier University

  We explore passion and its link to consumption and entrepreneurial practice through the context of celebrity culture and fashion. Our contribution is to consider passionate labours and forms of production as vital substances for the making and reshaping of markets. Our theorization emerged from a three year netnography on the Kate Middleton celebrity princess brand which focused on the entrepreneurial passions, skills and merchandising of Kate bloggers. We reveal the ways in which these bloggers inspire their followers on how celebritization and accessibility can go hand in hand. The Kate bloggers reveal themselves as not simply consumers of unfulfilled desire and celebrity worship but rather, become exemplars of achieved entrepreneurship. We thus conceptualise consumer passion as distinct from the more typical focus on consumer desire. Whereas desire takes us to seduction, transgression and insatiability, passion takes us to creativity, etiquette and labours of production.