Taste in appearance: self, cultivated dispositions, and cultural capital

The purpose of the study is to develop a theory about taste in appearance and to investigate if cultural capital, proposed by Bourdieu (1984), is a relevant concept in explaining appearance-related consumption. Taste has been studied in two disciplines. Philosophers defined taste as an aesthetic aptitude or capacity to discover beauty from works of art. Sociologists conceptualized taste as a cultivated disposition in the guise of an innate disposition in a broad range of cultural products. While philosophers endeavored to conceptualized taste in relation to beauty, sociologists associated taste with social acceptance or attractiveness.;Phenomenological interviews were conducted with 16 participants from upper-middle and middle class backgrounds who lived in three Midwestern cities. Information about participants\u27 demographic and family backgrounds was also collected. Participants were selected through a snowball sampling procedure to have varied background characteristics. A constant comparative approach to qualitative data analysis was conducted to find important themes and explore differences among participants related to their backgrounds (Strauss, 1987).;The content of the interviews indicated that taste in appearance is a cultivated disposition to direct consumption activities. Taste included preferences for putting together outfits as well as for particular aesthetic elements. Participants described taste in terms of how they related particular things to themselves (self-concept) and why they liked particular things (motives). Participants\u27 preferences indicated their struggle with ambivalence about how much they wanted to fit in but remain somewhat different from others and how much they wanted to keep their appearance up-to-date and in fashion. Taste was actualized through the exercise of appearance-specific motives and efficient appearance management strategies, including optimizing the use of given resources and negotiating conflicts among preferences and resources.;With respect to evaluation of taste, participants evaluated taste as a sum of the appearance and the consumption skills of a person, because taste was communicated through presentation of one\u27s appearance. Evaluation included judging how well appearance embodies an actor, how motives in clothing practice were successfully pursued and how an actor successfully managed constraints and balanced ambivalent factors.;Level of cultural capital possessed by the participants differentially shaped social actors\u27 experiences of appearance consumption. The resources of cultural capital, including upbringing, education, and occupation (Bourdieu, 1984), provided participants with an aptitude for involvement in appearance consumption, including sensitivity to dressing appropriately, capacity to construct and communicate meanings, and opportunities and refinement of dressing practices. Among the participants, about half had background characteristics indicating fairly high level of cultural capital, and the other half had a middle range of cultural capital. For those with higher level of cultural capital, manifested taste was constructed with a higher degree of complexity than among participants with a middle level of cultural capital. High cultural capital individuals showed greater evidence of aesthetic involvement through clothing practices.;The findings have practical implications for apparel marketers. Knowledge of levels of cultural capital of target customers will help define strategies for advertising, store layout and merchandise display. The findings have useful implications for marketing of products other than clothing

Curating The Self: A Proposed Intervention for Positive Identity Crafting Through Self-presentation and Clothing

The new field of positive psychology offers an opportunity to study what healthy people need in order to flourish. Just as eating, sleeping, and working are part of a fulfilling life, both how we experience ourselves and how others experience us, our identity, is a foundational pathway for creating relationships and producing well-being. Presenting oneself visually through the body and its adornment is a way in which we share ourselves and relate to others in the world. I argue in this capstone that self-presentation through the body and clothing is an omnipresent leverage point in shaping one’s identity in positive ways. This capstone draws on relevant literature from psychology and sociology to propose an intervention designed to support identity crafting through self-presentation and clothing on an ongoing basis

The Spread Fashion: an Explorative Research of Italian Fashion Blog

In the collaborative context of the web 2.0 the blogging phenomenon has become one of the most common ways to communicate and share information through its user-generated content. In the blogosphere fashion blogs represent probably one of the liveliest segments. Focusing on fashion brands, fashion products, street style, and personal style, fashion blogs can be written by both fashion professionals and normal people with an interest in the fashion system. This phenomenon has become even more relevant since the fashion brands have recognized the role of fashion bloggers in influencing the final consumers as well as the role of peer – to – peer recommendations in shaping desires and attires of fashion blog users. The paper presents the preliminary results of a netnographic analysis conducted on some of the most popular Italian ‘non-professional’ fashion blogs in order to map the different approach to this grassrooted blog phenomenon, and to categorize and interpret the blog postings and the audience comments concerning fashion product-related information

ファッションのための深層学習：服装の統一性評価と格付けおよび推薦

Tohoku University岡谷貴之課

Playing through clothes: Clothes as a creative tool in the School environment

Led by the French National Museum of Education and Heriot-Watt University (UK), Dressed for School involves a group of interdisciplinary researchers, educators and design practitioners, aiming to analyse the interactions between children and their clothes at school. As part of this project, a series of case studies focuses on the functional and creative impact of children’s clothing at school. This paper presents the findings gathered at an intermediary stage of an interdisciplinary project ongoing until 2022, and their evaluation thanks to cross-disciplinary and mixed anthropological methods with and on school aged children. Placing the child at the heart of the process, in well identified contexts, this research provides educationally impactful pilots where clothes are considered as legitimate components of a Learning through play approach. Beyond the sole context of the United-Kingdom (Scotland) and France, this research highlights the need for more consideration of children as users and co-designers of their own clothes. Using the COVID-19 »opportunity« to observe children in unprecedented experiences, this impactful project invites industry and policy makers to place a different perspective on clothing. Indeed, this project questions clothing as a support for learning, a socialising and creative tool, and as having a legitimate role to play in children’s education. This innovative research could inspire educational experimentations towards the development of participative learning and co-creation in design, en oeuvre in Nordic countries.&nbsp

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation is composed of three essays about style discourse in fashion consumption. For the first chapter I developed a conceptual model to unravel the political process of meaning making between marketers and consumers. In particular, I draw on the concepts in the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe to develop the conceptual model to analyze the data of Chapter 2 and 3. The second chapter explores the mainstream discourse of having personal style with respect to fashion. For this second study, data have been collected from the TLC TV series What Not to Wear, an American reality television show that is based on a British Show of the same name. I chose episodes selected in What Not to Wear: Best of DVD with run time of 10 hours and 45 minutes. Transcripts of these episodes were produced and I analyzed how the notions of self, fashion, and style are intertwined in the discourse of the program. In this program the conflicts between the nominee and fashion consultants are prevalent components and there is some extent of negotiation between the two parties. Therefore, I also focus on this negotiation process and reveal how the hosts of the show win over the nominees. For the third chapter, I turn to the fans of the show What Not to Wear. Using postings on the web forum of the program I examined the ways fans integrate the cultural discourse of fashion on the program into their lives. Since there was an ample amount of data on the web forum, I sampled only the postings that were related to the episodes used in the second study. The focus of analysis is on the identification process of audience members: who do audience members identify with and how does such identification lead to specific ways of incorporating the fashion knowledge of the program? This study is expected to contribute to better understanding of how fashion reality shows have influence on consumption behaviors of audience members