Backpaking lifestyle
instead increasingly fashioned and differentiated through aesthetic consumption practices.
Distinctive consumption becomes a life project wherein ‘the particularity of the assemblage of
goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions’ are designed
together into a lifestyle (Featherstone, 1987, p. 59). Lifestyle practices such as habits of
dressing, what to eat, how to spend leisure time and even ‘favoured milieux’ become
‘decisions not only about how to act but who to be’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 81).
As increased consumer choice may afford a dizzying array of life options (Gergen, 1991),
the stylising of a distinctive mode of living also promises the opportunity to anchor one’s self
amidst the cacophony of liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000). Featherstone (1987) does
question, however, whether lifestyles actually cut across structures such as class and culture,
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