Representation of identity simulations through consumption posts on Instagram

New communication environments may enable experiencing both actual and possible selves based on the changes undergone by the instruments of mass communication. This study scrutinizes how fashion bloggers present themselves on Instagram, as one of the most popular social media platforms which offers the possibility of 7/24 socializing, information-gathering, entertaining, following the news and fashions etc., how they include the brands they cooperate with in this process, what messages they give to their followers by means of an important consumption practice like fashion, and how they perform their own self-presentations by making these messages a mediator. This study suggests that fashion bloggers who have significant numbers of followers on Instagram create new ideal selves for themselves by rearticulating their own consumption habits, social lives, family and friendship relations, marital statuses, education levels, career paths, ideological opinions etc. To sum up, the study underlines that a new self is created and presented with each activity performed on Instagram by a fashion blogger. Through in-depth interviews with five popular female fashion bloggers, the study discusses the strategies of self-presentation used by them within the interactive structure of social media, within the context of Ervin Goffman's theory of self-presentation in everyday life. It assesses the role of their consumption practices, particularly regarding fashion, in the way they present themselves on Instagram, drawing on Goffman's parameters of dramatic realization, idealization, mystification, reality and fake, region and region behaviors. The fashion bloggers also experience some tensions between their offline subjectivities and the virtual selves they represent on social media. Related to this, the study also handles how they resolve the tensions between their offline and online identities that emerges in the process of making their ideal selves into a brand by strategically isolating themselves from their offline identities. Keywords: consumption, fashion, self-presentation, social media, Instagram, fashion bloggers