Communication Aspects of Women's Clothes and their Relation to Fashionability

Abstract

It is argued that many of the suggested functions of clothing can be seen as special cases of the idea that it acts as a means of communication. Fashion changes may thus often be explainable as attempts to communicate superiority in some respects by the self‐defeating method of changing garment styles, for if they communicate successfully they will be imitated by many people and thus the message of the clothing will be changed. This will require a fashion change, again, to continue to communicate the same message. The experimental part of the paper reports an investigation in which six pictures of current outfits were judged by 50 15‐ or 16‐year‐old girls. The judgements were of two kinds: by a type of semantic differential scale, on which ideal self was also judged, and by a questionnaire asking specific questions about various attributes of the persons who would be likely to wear the outfits. The results indicated that there was high consensus as to the specific attributes seen by this group as belonging to the likely wearers of each dress which was not explicable on a general evaluative basis. It was also shown very clearly that the impression created by the liked dresses was seen as much nearer the impression of the ideal‐self than was the disliked ones and it was found that likers and dislikers differed, both in the actual ideal self image and in their judgements of the dresses, suggesting that liking is a form of ‘commitment’ which leads to the need for cognitive dissonance. A very important finding was that the first factor in the principal components analysis of the judgements of the dress was a factor which predicted ranked fashionableness in the group ( r = 0.99) rather than simply liking. This finding could provide a measuring device for analysing the cognitive content of fashion for different groups and for studying the possible change of meaning of an outfit as it passes into and out of fashion.

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