Consumer Behavior & Women’s Fashion An interesting stereotype at Chinquapin University is the girls are always “dressing to impressing. ” Why is this, not only at Chinquapin, but at other schools as well? We were interested as to what influences girls to choose certain outfits. Our group decided to take the initiative to research why girls purchase the clothes that they wear. We were also interested as to how males, the opposite sex, influence the female purchase decision when it comes to clothing items and picking out outfits for the day or night. Once we came across our topic, several questions came to mind.
What do girls wear in the college scene and why do they wear it? What do guys want to see girls’ wear, day or night? What factors into what girls purchase for clothing? Do college girls purchase certain outfits based on their personal looks, and how they might feel the look to their peers? Also, do girls purchase certain outfits based on the attractiveness, trendiest and/or comfort of the clothing items? After creating a survey for females and males asking a series of questions based on clothes and opinion, we came up with hypotheses as to what we think we will draw from the results and conclusions.
Our group believed that during the day, girls wear specific outfits based on what their friends wear and what is comfortable. At night, however, we felt as if girls wear outfits based on what they believe guys want to see them wear. In general, our group believed girls do not feel they need to dress to impress guys, but they still unconsciously do choose certain clothes or outfits based on what they feel a guy may like to see them in. Also, we felt as if guys generally do not care what girls wear. Each article we used gave us brief background research on our project topic of omen’s fashion and consumer behavior.
Our academic research findings were informative and helped us gain a better understanding of our topic, along with guide us in the analysis of our results and conclusions after conducting the survey. Martin Evans states an interesting idea of how fashion buying could have much to do with projecting images of how buyers see themselves, or would like to be seen by their peers and society. Relating it back to our group’s theories, girls may choose to purchase the clothes they wear because they believe it may look good on them, or owe a article of clothing looks on a model, is how the girl may think it will look on her as she purchases it. Fashion can be almost the ideal product for expressing physical and psychological aspects of self… ” (Evans 13). Fashion consumption is often a manifestation of self-image. There is an increase in the desire for self-expression and the continuing for the matching of female self-images and brand images. Clothing is seen as one of the most visible forms of consumption and forms a major role in the social construction of identity, according to Diana Crane in her book Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing.
Clothing choices interprets a specific form of culture among people for their own purposes. As artifacts, clothing can somehow “create” behavior through their capacity to impose social identities and empower people to assert a certain social identity. When giving out our survey, we wondered why would girls wear this certain outfit to school, or to hang out with friends, or to a bar. Also, how does wearing this certain outfit or clothing item reflect the girl? Is she somehow showing her social identity among her errs or does she feel the comfortableness to wear what she wants to wear.
In all societies, the clothes which all people wear have at least three (mixed latent and main-fest) functions: utilitarian, esthetics and symbolic of their social role. Bernard Barber and Lyle S. Lobe believe “pretty’ clothes for the teen-age girl in American society, for instance, are defined by her social role, especially by her presumed sexual innocence. In the American class system, women take their class status, by and large, from their relationship to men: unmarried young women from their fathers, adult married women from their husbands.
The symbolic significance of women’s consumption puts in evidence her household stability. The “trickle” system is perpetuated because the American class system makes women continually seek for symbols of their difference from those Jus below them in the system. At the same time, women continually seek for symbols of their equality with those Just above them in the class ranking. Symbolically speaking, women and girls dress to prove their equality among others such as men and lower/higher American class systems. Hymnbook, Rhea, and Oakley compared fashion process networks and friendship outworks in small groups of adolescents.
They wanted to explore the overall pattern of a fashion-process network and a friendship network, explore structural differences in relational links of “clothing acceptance” and “social acceptance;” and discover the factors that contribute to “clothing leadership” and “popularity’ in small groups of adolescents. These authors found clothing acceptance is related to peer acceptance and is found to occur within and across friendship links. The most significant factor in determining this “clothing leadership” is found to be “facial attractiveness.
In addition, “facial attractiveness” had a significant effect on “popularity. ” Clothing acceptance was found to be closely related to social acceptance, which our group believed was a reason why girls purchase the clothes they wear to possibly “fit in” with society, friends and peers. Harridan and Booger researched towards a better understanding of fashion clothing involvement. The study was concerned with consumer involvement in fashion clothing. It focused on building a reliable immunological network to bring a greater understanding to this facet of consumer behavior.
Materialism and gender are significant drivers of fashion clothing involvement. Also, recreational shopper identity, ongoing information search, market mavens and purchase decision involvement are all significant outcomes of fashion clothing involvement. Materialism, what girls think society wants them to wear, and gender, the opposite sex, both have potential to play a huge role in why girls choose their outfits and what drives them to wear a certain article of clothing. Our execution of the research further describes our background knowledge of women’s fashion and consumer behavior
