ABSTRACT
During the 2010 back-to-school retail season, The Walt Disney Company introduced the first in a growing collection of fashion lines for tween girls under the umbrella label D-Signed, in Target stores throughout the United States. The initial line was based on the costumes of lead character Sonny Munroe of Disney Channel's Sonny with a Chance. The introduction of the D-Signed collection, however, marked an unprecedented expansion of synergistic marketing strategies for comprehensive lifestyle branding for the tween girl market in the United States. The D-Signed fashion collection cannot be understood simply as a series of youthful feminine costumes. This chapter examines how D-Signed fashion lines and their promotional media and star personae operate as sites of production for conventions of femininity and Western ideals of contemporary girlhood. Relationship branding efforts that employ digital media and technologies have allowed Disney to systematically build D-Signed fashion lines into its talent-driven transmedia franchises since 2010.
