Consumer Culture and Purchase Intentions towards Fashion Apparel

This study examines the effectiveness of different fashion marketing strategies and analyzes of the consumer behavior in a cross-section of demographic settings in reference to fashion apparel retailing. This paper also discusses the marketing competencies of fashion apparel brands and retailers in reference to brand image, promotions, and externalmarket knowledge. The study examines the determinants of consumer behavior and their impact on purchase intentions towards fashion apparel. The results reveal that sociocultural and personality related factors induce the purchase intentions among consumers. One of the contributions that this research extends is the debate about the converging economic, cognitive and brand related factors to induce purchase intentions. Fashion loving consumers typically patronage multi-channel retail outlets, designer brands, and invest time and cost towards an advantageous product search. The results of the study show a positive effect of store and brand preferences on developing purchase intentions for fashion apparel among consumers.Consumer behavior, purchase intention, socio-cultural values, designer brands, store brands, fashion apparel, brand promotion, personalization, fashion retailing, psychographic drivers

Sustainable clothing: challenges, barriers and interventions for encouraging more sustainable consumer behaviour

Research with consumers has revealed limited awareness of the sustainability impact of clothing (Goworek et al., 2012). Semi-structured interviews conducted with a range of experts in sustainable clothing to increase understanding of the challenges for sustainable clothing revealed that a focus on sustainability alone will not drive the necessary changes in consumers’ clothing purchase, care and disposal behaviour for three reasons: (i) clothing sustainability is too complex; (ii) consumers are too diverse in their ethical concerns; and (iii) clothing is not an altruistic purchase. The findings identify the challenges that need to be addressed and the associated barriers for sustainable clothing. Interventions targeting consumers, suppliers, buyers and retailers are proposed that encourage more sustainable clothing production, purchase, care and disposal behaviour. These interventions range from normalising the design of sustainable clothing and increasing the ease of purchase, to shifting clothes washing norms and increasing upcycling, recycling and repair

Exploring the Abilities of 3D Printing and its Viability for Consumption in the Fashion Industry

Abstract With the ever-evolving state of today’s technology, designers and retailers in the apparel industry are seeking out new technological methods that have the capacity to revolutionize and individualize their brand, as well as meet consumer needs and preferences. An emerging technology is 3D printing, which utilizes computer-aided technology and a variety of filaments to construct an object. Though 3D printing technology offers the ability for rapid prototyping, a condensed supply chain, and a sustainable additive manufacturing process, there is question as to whether or not consumers are ready for 3D printed clothing to enter their wardrobes. In this creative study, the authors designed a 3D printed garment in order to test whether 3D printers could be used to make wearable clothing of similar characteristics to clothing typically made of fabric. A survey was then conducted on the University of Arkansas campus to measure consumer response to the project garment. Three primary factors were measured: prior exposure and interest in 3D printing, general fashion interest, and aesthetic appeal of the project 3D printed garment. Overall perceptions of the project garment as well as further use of 3D printing for the apparel industry were positive. The ability of this study to create a fully 3D printed garment as well as understand consumer response to 3D printed clothing provides insight into this emerging technology. The results warrant further research into its capabilities for fashion and that the fashion industry could move towards adopting this technology on a wider scale in coming years. The results indicate that a major transformation in ready-to-wear style is feasible and beneficial to the apparel industry because of 3D printing. Keywords: 3D printing, fashion, consumer preference, sustainability, apparel, technolog

LiveCap: Real-time Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video

We present the first real-time human performance capture approach that reconstructs dense, space-time coherent deforming geometry of entire humans in general everyday clothing from just a single RGB video. We propose a novel two-stage analysis-by-synthesis optimization whose formulation and implementation are designed for high performance. In the first stage, a skinned template model is jointly fitted to background subtracted input video, 2D and 3D skeleton joint positions found using a deep neural network, and a set of sparse facial landmark detections. In the second stage, dense non-rigid 3D deformations of skin and even loose apparel are captured based on a novel real-time capable algorithm for non-rigid tracking using dense photometric and silhouette constraints. Our novel energy formulation leverages automatically identified material regions on the template to model the differing non-rigid deformation behavior of skin and apparel. The two resulting non-linear optimization problems per-frame are solved with specially-tailored data-parallel Gauss-Newton solvers. In order to achieve real-time performance of over 25Hz, we design a pipelined parallel architecture using the CPU and two commodity GPUs. Our method is the first real-time monocular approach for full-body performance capture. Our method yields comparable accuracy with off-line performance capture techniques, while being orders of magnitude faster

The influence of clothing on first impressions : Rapid and positive responses to minor changes in male attire

Clothing communicates information about the wearer and first impressions can be heavily influenced by the messages conveyed by attire. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of minor changes in clothing on the perception of a male model, in the absence of facial information with limited time exposurePeer reviewe

Localization Economies, Vertical Organization and Trade

This paper develops a model of regional production networks based on localization economies. I consider an industry with two activities: one with location-specific external economies, the other with constant returns. Under autarky, localization economies imply the formation of an industry center. Agglomeration drives up wages in the center, causing the constant returns activity to disperse to outlying regions. Trade recreates the regional production network on a global scale. I apply the model to data from the Mexican apparel industry. Estimation results on Mexico's pre- and post-trade regional apparel wage structure are consistent with localization economies. Implications for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are discussed.

Promoting sustainable Indian textiles: final report to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), London, UK

In 2009, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), through the Sustainable Development Dialogue (SDD) fund, backed the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) at London College of Fashion and Pearl Academy of Fashion (PAF), New Delhi to run a project to promote Indian sustainable textiles. Improving patterns of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) in India and the UK is one of the agreed areas for collaboration under the UK-India Sustainable Development Dialogue. The project is also part of a body of work taking place under the Defra Sustainable Clothing Roadmap, which aims to improve the sustainability of clothing. Defra has identified that ‘while an economic success story (globally worth over £500 billion) the industry has a significant environmental and social footprint across its supply chain.’ The Roadmap aims to improve the sustainability of clothing by gathering a robust evidence base of impacts and working with a wide range of stakeholders, to build on existing interventions. For more details on the roadmap see: http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/business/products/roadmaps/clothing/index.htm This report is only one of the dissemination tools associated with the project. The project film, images and website should be viewed in conjunction with this report