Algorithmic Affect and Micro-Gestures: Emotional Codes in Fashion Live Shopping Streaming (LSS)

Abstract

Live Shopping Streaming (LSS) is rapidly reshaping digital fashion retail by combining real-time commerce with entertainment, social interaction, and emotional performance. Existing research often treats engagement, trust, and impulse buying as outcomes of livestreaming, while emotional dynamics are measured as aggregate psychological states rather than as situated, embodied, and culturally patterned practices. This paper addresses this gap by examining how affect is performed, structured, and interpreted in fashion live shopping across Eastern and Western contexts. The study employs a mixed-methods design, integrating digital ethnography, multimodal interaction analysis, surveys, and semi-structured interviews. Fashion livestreams on Douyin, Taobao Live, TikTok Shop, and Instagram Live between 2022 and 2024 were analyzed, alongside audience research with Generation Z fashion students in Italy. Emotional performance is treated as a semiotically organized, interactional achievement shaped by platform affordances, cultural expectations, and algorithmic feedback. Findings show that emotional performance is culturally patterned rather than platform-determined. Eastern livestreams emphasize affective escalation, gestural density, and authority-based authenticity, translating emotion into rapid economic action. Western livestreams foreground relational affect, conversational pacing, and curated aesthetics, supporting slower, trust-based engagement. Across contexts, authenticity emerges not as the absence of performance but as a culturally specific mode of affective staging. Engagement is driven by calibrated affect, visual coherence, and responsive interaction rather than intensity alone. By framing affect as codified performance, this paper positions fashion live shopping as a key site for examining emotional labor, human–technology interaction, and algorithmic governance, offering new insights into cross-cultural digital consumption practices and the socio-technical dynamics of contemporary live commerce.

Keywords: Fashion Live Shopping, Algorithmic Affect, Micro-gestures, Emotional Coding, Co-creation, Consumer Behavior, Digital Innovation, Semiotics

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007731