As part of a recent leadership conference at my university, undergraduate student leaders invited a poet and hip-hop artist as the keynote speaker. To the surprise of many, the artist spoke almost entirely about how he didn’t know anything about leadership and didn’t want to know about it, how he hated leaders, and how he didn’t trust anyone to be a leader, especially those who proclaimed to BE leaders. Adding more shock to the keynote, he heavily peppered the speech with disturbing profanity. The response to his speech was dismay from the administration, astonishment from the faculty, and great enthusiasm from the majority of the students. Those students resonated with his antileadership message, even though they had voluntarily attended the day-long conference designed to develop their leadership skills. The event left me struck by the paradox of our students’ fascination with this “notleader” at the same time they were voluntarily attending a leadership conference designed to build their leadership skills.

Recent theoretical arguments about the inter-locking of identity and consumption pose a challenge to individuality. We explore this initially through literatures relating to the paradox that arises from the role of the (fashion) code and the use of social groupings in the production of the self through consumption practices. Then we explore individuality through narrative data collected by multiple methods in two studies. Detailed analysis of consumption accounts shows the marking of one’s individuality to be an important, if often precarious, accomplishment. Rhetorical devices we associate with this accomplishment include the rejection of the dictates of mass fashion and branding, the development of a personal choice rationale and the definition of the self as somehow different from a mass other. We argue that the consumer paradox exists but is more or less successfully resolved through such devices. In resolution of the paradox we suggest that while the consumer collective is semiotically represented, representations of individuality are adequately and locally narrated.