Fashion is a ubiquitous social phenomenon. People chase after fashionable clothes, furniture and jewelry for reasons beyond utilitarian benefits. Many people did not associate information technologies with fashion for a long time. Nevertheless, as consumer technologies become increasingly smaller and more portable, they can be carried around as body accessories that bear social meanings. The fashion elements have begun to exert tremendous influence on consumers’ behaviors and companies’ successes. The advent of fashionable technologies necessitates thorough research on IT fashion.
This dissertation aims to provide a systematic understanding of fashionable technologies. It first elucidates the process of IT fashion diffusion based on extant fashion theories and the unique characteristics of fashionable technologies. Then it investigates the reasons why people adopt fashionable technologies by identifying the core characteristics of fashionable technologies perceived by adopters and explicating how these perceived characteristics affect people’s behavioral beliefs of using the technologies. To empirically test the research model, 256 responses were collected by hiring a professional survey company Qualtrics. The results support most of the hypotheses. The current dissertation lays the foundation for future IT fashion research and potentially breaks new theoretical grounds for the IS field
