Academic literature on the topic 'Clothing and dress – Social aspects – Nigeria'

With the continuous development of animation industry, the clothing modeling of the animation character is more and more concerned. This paper found the connection of three aspects, which is that shaping the role determines the vitality, creativity and appealingness of the animation, animation dress help to shape the roles and art image, animation apparel modeling is different from the real clothing modeling by means of analyzing the relation between shaping the animation role and the clothing modeling. Through the research of the performance of the clothing modeling in shaping the animation role, this paper concludes that the functions of the roles dress in the animation works lie mainly in four aspects such as the roles age, occupation, social status, nationality, etc; the extent of role performance; promoting the development of the plot; decorating and beautifying the roles modeling. This research will provide the animation creator with a reference to perfectly sculpture the image of animation role and design the role dress and follow-up related research.

Abstract This article focuses on the relevance and consequences of visibility of religious identity respectively difference by means of religiously connoted clothing. Based on six case studies it emphasizes the perspective of wearers of religious vestment in the area of Zürich (Switzerland). The project takes account of the fact, that the aspect of visual, respectively embodied (religious) difference is not only of relevance to Muslim headscarf wearers (though, due to eager public discussion, it became here the most obvious, and the main subject of scientific interest), but also for wearers of religious clothing belonging to other religious communities. Regarding the case studies the present article will mainly focus on three aspects of religious clothing: firstly, it will address one important motive (among others) for wearing religious dress. Secondly, the individual perceptions of visual difference based on the specific way of sartorial self-presentation will be thematised — especially regarding their involvement with their social environment. Finally, various individual strategies for coping with tensions based on the experience of visual difference will be demonstrated.

The development of global currents has an impact on various aspects of life, including community culture. One of them is in terms of clothing which is influenced by foreign cultures. This of course degrades ethical values ​​in the use of clothing, especially clothing used at social events or places of worship such as traditional clothing to temples. The influence of outside culture that is abused certainly causes deviations in ethical values ​​in the use of traditional clothing to the temple, one of the villages affected by the deviation is Penarungan Village. As a tourism destination, the people of Penarungan Village cannot turn a blind eye to outside culture, this causes deviations in ethical values ​​of traditional dress to the temple in Penarungan village. This research uses value theory, behaviorism, and social interaction. The approach used is ethnography. Informants were determined by purposive sampling. The research location chosen was Penarungan Village. Data collection techniques are by observation, interviews, and library techniques. The results of the study show that the forms of deviation from ethical values ​​in traditional attire to the temple in Penarungan Village include: (1) Deviations using kamen, (2) loose hair, (3) transparent and vulgar clothes, (4) T-shirts. the causes of deviations in values. Ethical factors in traditional kepura dress in Penarungan Village include (1) social media, (2) development of the times, (3) economic factors. The strategies of Hindu religious leaders in strengthening ethical values ​​in traditional attire to temples in Penungan Village (1) bring order to the people who violate them, (2) use uniform clothing.

This qualitative research examined the issues of women’s head covering in Islam and Judaism. It focuses on the role played by head-covering decisions in the development of religious identity. Translated sources of Islamic and Jewish law on modest dress set the context of religious rulings in which women wrestle with decisions about head-covering. Ten practising Muslim and Jewish women were interviewed about their experiences of head/hair covering. Head/hair covering was seen as an expression of identity, and as a way of managing identity. It is a key topic for both Muslim and Jewish women, central in identity development and in decisions relating to identity development, identity threat, acculturation, spirituality, and social relations with men. The role of dress is one of many aspects of ritual deserving closer attention from psychologists of religion, along with the more general topic of the impact of religious practice on religious and spiritual development.

AbstractThe study explores the role of clothing in the constitution of embodied masculinity in age, contrasting its results with an earlier study of women. It draws four main conclusions. First that men's responses to dress were marked by continuity both with their younger selves and with mainstream masculinity, of which they still felt themselves to be part. Age was less a point of challenge or change than for many women. Second, men's responses were less affected by cultural codes in relation to age. Dress was not, by and large, seen through the lens of age; and there was not the sense of cultural exile that had marked many of the women's responses. Third, for some older men dress could be part of wider moral engagement, expressive of values linked positively to age, embodying old-fashioned values that endorsed their continuing value as older men. Lastly, dress in age reveals some of the ways in which men retain aspects of earlier gender privilege. The study was based on qualitative interviews with 24 men aged 58–85, selected to display a range in terms of social class, occupation, sexuality, employment and relationship status. It forms part of the wider intellectual movement of cultural gerontology that aims to expand the contexts in which we explore later years; and contributes to a new focus on materiality within sociology.

This book is a very welcome addition to the literature on Muslim women’s dress. It is part of a growing trend to treat Muslim women and their sarto- rial choices through sophisticated theories that recognise the agency, even humanity, of Muslim women. We are far from the days when an Ameri- can author would simply read a headscarf as a symbol of oppression, and Muslim women in need of rescue—at least in the academic realm, though certainly not in the political and journalistic realms. Easy to read and en- gaging (but not simplistic) studies like Bucar’s will, hopefully, eventually trickle out of academia and lead to a sea-change in political and popular discourses as well. Bucar, a professor of philosophy and religion, has turned to ethnog- raphy to complement her philosophical explorations of the relationship between dress, aesthetics, and morality. One of the special features of this book, and what I believe distinguishes it and makes its insights possible, is Bucar’s self-reflective nature, and willingness to share that as she writes. The book begins with a preface, which explains how Bucar came to study this topic while in Tehran to study Persian and Islamic women’s groups in 2004. It opens with her very honest discussion of how she was sitting nervously in the airplane, wondering whether or not she would be able to follow the conditions of her visa to observe local laws and wear “proper hi- jab” (vii). A woman sitting in the aisle across from her winks and pulls out her own scarf and overcoat, setting Bucar at ease, who then follows suit. She describes how she spent a few months adjusting to wearing hijab and figur- ing out the various ways women in Tehran adhere to the hijab laws. Flying next to Turkey, and experiencing some unexpected internal reactions to going bareheaded, made her see that “modest dress had a moral effect on me” (ix), altering her sense of public space and the aesthetics of women’s clothing. “I found surprise, pleasure, and delight in pious fashion, as well as an intellectual challenge to the neat boxes I had once put things in: modest dress as imposed on women, fashion as a symptom of patriarchy, and aes- thetics as separate from ethics. This book is an exploration of this delight and challenge” (ix). Following is the introduction, where she lays out her key terms, meth- odology, and research questions. Bucar explains that she prefers the term “pious fashion” to “modest clothing” or “fashion veiling.” This is so because clothing is a cultural practice that is “governed by social forces as well as daily individual choices” (2). “Fashion” allows people to “construct iden- tities, communicate status, and challenge aesthetic preferences.” “Modest” is generally meant to describe clothing that is “decent and demure,” that discourages sexual attention, but she learned that Muslim women’s dress is more than this, as it is connected to “ethical and religious dimensions… such as character formation through bodily action, regulating sexual de- sires between men and women, and creating public space organized around Islamic moral principles” (3). Hence her preference for the phrase “pious fashion.”Next appear country case studies of how Muslim women in different locales take up “pious fashion”. She did fieldwork in three cities—Tehran, Iran (2004 and remotely 2011); Istanbul, Turkey (2004, 2012, 2013); and Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2011)—observing women in a variety of locations, going shopping, and participating in activities related to pious fashion (in- cluding wearing it herself sometimes). She conducted focus groups and interviews with women between ages eighteen and thirty wearing pious fashion. After opening with a brief introduction to the country-specific poli- tics of modest dress, each chapter is divided into two main sections: “style snapshots” and “aesthetic authorities.” The style snapshots are often very detailed descriptions (half a page for a single outfit) of different kinds of dress, including material, stitching, colour, patterns, style cuts, and accesso- ries. These sections can be a challenge for those not that interested in such details of fashion. The book contains twenty color photographs to illus- trate the styles of dress she discusses, but I still found a laptop an essential component to look up images of the stylists she was referring to, or more basic visual aids to know the difference between “chiffon” and “crepe,” or a “manteau” and a “tunic.” Yet it is such intimate details that give life to her book. These details of fashion are not the object of the book, though, for she embeds these discussions in deeper conversations about aesthetics, moral- ity, piety, beauty, and cultural and political aspects of clothing and fashion. The sections on “aesthetic authorities” cover religious authorities, governments, visual images, educators, fashion designers, magazines, and bloggers’ pious fashion discourses in each country. She is able to highlight differences and similarities across countries, as well as the prevalence of different interpretations and debates amongst all these different voices on what does and does not count as “pious fashion.” She includes discussions about what are counted as “bad hijab” or fashion failures, as an important way to understand the delimitations of pious fashion in each country. Chapter Four presents summarizing conclusions. Here she argues that unlike the normal western approach which considers hijab as a “problem” to be solved, it is rather a woman’s decision about what to wear which should be analytically considered: “the duty to dress modestly does not resolve this question: even if certain institutional structures and public norms related to taste, virtue, and femininity set limits and provide guidance, Muslim wom- en have a great deal of choice when they get dressed every day” (171). She explores the intersections between national identity, modernity, femininity, modesty, aesthetic rebellion, women’s agency, materialism, the consumer lifestyle, aesthetic concepts of beauty and its relationship to morality and fashion, and tradition and change. She concludes that the study of pious fashion teaches us that piety…[is] not just about obedience to orthodox interpretations of sacred texts: it also incorporates good taste, personal style, and physical attrac- tiveness. And fashion becomes a key location through which piety can be realized and contested. Piety is not only about being good – it is about appearing to be good as well…[Women who wear pious fashion] are pi- ous because they are using clothing and adornment to cultivate their own characters, to build community, and to make social critiques. (190) The book ends with an epilogue pointing to a sudden interest, since 2016, in “pious fashion” from the mainstream Western ‘secular’ fashion industry. She notes the two different directions this goes politically—ei- ther to celebrate Muslim women’s inclusion in wider society (CoverGirl’s use of first hijabi spokesperson, Nura Afia, 2016, 195) or to criticise Islam’s pollution of secular fashion (designers are encouraging the enslavement of women) (196). One of the main reasons this book works so well is Bucar’s wonderful ability to be empathetic without being an apologist. She does not wear hijab in her life in the United States; the book is not advocating hijab. She does not gloss feminist concerns over patriarchy and pressures to wear hijab, nor the impact of hijab laws that frustrate many women in Tehran. She recognises the complex nature between dress, identity, fashion, and philo- sophical questions like ethics and the nature of being. She normalizes hijiab so that it can be studied, not as some kind of weird, exotic, oppressive, sui generis piece of cloth, but like any other piece of women’s clothing, like mini-skirts, jeans, high heels, or the bra: While modest clothing can indeed be used as a form of social control or as a display of religious orthodoxy, in practice, it is both much less and much more. Much less, because for many Muslim women, it is simply what they wear. Much more, because like all clothing, Muslim women’s clothing is diverse, both historically and geographically, and is connected with much broader cultural systems. (1) Katherine BullockLecturer, Department of Political ScienceUniversity of Toronto at Mississauga

This book is a very welcome addition to the literature on Muslim women’s dress. It is part of a growing trend to treat Muslim women and their sarto- rial choices through sophisticated theories that recognise the agency, even humanity, of Muslim women. We are far from the days when an Ameri- can author would simply read a headscarf as a symbol of oppression, and Muslim women in need of rescue—at least in the academic realm, though certainly not in the political and journalistic realms. Easy to read and en- gaging (but not simplistic) studies like Bucar’s will, hopefully, eventually trickle out of academia and lead to a sea-change in political and popular discourses as well. Bucar, a professor of philosophy and religion, has turned to ethnog- raphy to complement her philosophical explorations of the relationship between dress, aesthetics, and morality. One of the special features of this book, and what I believe distinguishes it and makes its insights possible, is Bucar’s self-reflective nature, and willingness to share that as she writes. The book begins with a preface, which explains how Bucar came to study this topic while in Tehran to study Persian and Islamic women’s groups in 2004. It opens with her very honest discussion of how she was sitting nervously in the airplane, wondering whether or not she would be able to follow the conditions of her visa to observe local laws and wear “proper hi- jab” (vii). A woman sitting in the aisle across from her winks and pulls out her own scarf and overcoat, setting Bucar at ease, who then follows suit. She describes how she spent a few months adjusting to wearing hijab and figur- ing out the various ways women in Tehran adhere to the hijab laws. Flying next to Turkey, and experiencing some unexpected internal reactions to going bareheaded, made her see that “modest dress had a moral effect on me” (ix), altering her sense of public space and the aesthetics of women’s clothing. “I found surprise, pleasure, and delight in pious fashion, as well as an intellectual challenge to the neat boxes I had once put things in: modest dress as imposed on women, fashion as a symptom of patriarchy, and aes- thetics as separate from ethics. This book is an exploration of this delight and challenge” (ix). Following is the introduction, where she lays out her key terms, meth- odology, and research questions. Bucar explains that she prefers the term “pious fashion” to “modest clothing” or “fashion veiling.” This is so because clothing is a cultural practice that is “governed by social forces as well as daily individual choices” (2). “Fashion” allows people to “construct iden- tities, communicate status, and challenge aesthetic preferences.” “Modest” is generally meant to describe clothing that is “decent and demure,” that discourages sexual attention, but she learned that Muslim women’s dress is more than this, as it is connected to “ethical and religious dimensions… such as character formation through bodily action, regulating sexual de- sires between men and women, and creating public space organized around Islamic moral principles” (3). Hence her preference for the phrase “pious fashion.”Next appear country case studies of how Muslim women in different locales take up “pious fashion”. She did fieldwork in three cities—Tehran, Iran (2004 and remotely 2011); Istanbul, Turkey (2004, 2012, 2013); and Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2011)—observing women in a variety of locations, going shopping, and participating in activities related to pious fashion (in- cluding wearing it herself sometimes). She conducted focus groups and interviews with women between ages eighteen and thirty wearing pious fashion. After opening with a brief introduction to the country-specific poli- tics of modest dress, each chapter is divided into two main sections: “style snapshots” and “aesthetic authorities.” The style snapshots are often very detailed descriptions (half a page for a single outfit) of different kinds of dress, including material, stitching, colour, patterns, style cuts, and accesso- ries. These sections can be a challenge for those not that interested in such details of fashion. The book contains twenty color photographs to illus- trate the styles of dress she discusses, but I still found a laptop an essential component to look up images of the stylists she was referring to, or more basic visual aids to know the difference between “chiffon” and “crepe,” or a “manteau” and a “tunic.” Yet it is such intimate details that give life to her book. These details of fashion are not the object of the book, though, for she embeds these discussions in deeper conversations about aesthetics, moral- ity, piety, beauty, and cultural and political aspects of clothing and fashion. The sections on “aesthetic authorities” cover religious authorities, governments, visual images, educators, fashion designers, magazines, and bloggers’ pious fashion discourses in each country. She is able to highlight differences and similarities across countries, as well as the prevalence of different interpretations and debates amongst all these different voices on what does and does not count as “pious fashion.” She includes discussions about what are counted as “bad hijab” or fashion failures, as an important way to understand the delimitations of pious fashion in each country. Chapter Four presents summarizing conclusions. Here she argues that unlike the normal western approach which considers hijab as a “problem” to be solved, it is rather a woman’s decision about what to wear which should be analytically considered: “the duty to dress modestly does not resolve this question: even if certain institutional structures and public norms related to taste, virtue, and femininity set limits and provide guidance, Muslim wom- en have a great deal of choice when they get dressed every day” (171). She explores the intersections between national identity, modernity, femininity, modesty, aesthetic rebellion, women’s agency, materialism, the consumer lifestyle, aesthetic concepts of beauty and its relationship to morality and fashion, and tradition and change. She concludes that the study of pious fashion teaches us that piety…[is] not just about obedience to orthodox interpretations of sacred texts: it also incorporates good taste, personal style, and physical attrac- tiveness. And fashion becomes a key location through which piety can be realized and contested. Piety is not only about being good – it is about appearing to be good as well…[Women who wear pious fashion] are pi- ous because they are using clothing and adornment to cultivate their own characters, to build community, and to make social critiques. (190) The book ends with an epilogue pointing to a sudden interest, since 2016, in “pious fashion” from the mainstream Western ‘secular’ fashion industry. She notes the two different directions this goes politically—ei- ther to celebrate Muslim women’s inclusion in wider society (CoverGirl’s use of first hijabi spokesperson, Nura Afia, 2016, 195) or to criticise Islam’s pollution of secular fashion (designers are encouraging the enslavement of women) (196). One of the main reasons this book works so well is Bucar’s wonderful ability to be empathetic without being an apologist. She does not wear hijab in her life in the United States; the book is not advocating hijab. She does not gloss feminist concerns over patriarchy and pressures to wear hijab, nor the impact of hijab laws that frustrate many women in Tehran. She recognises the complex nature between dress, identity, fashion, and philo- sophical questions like ethics and the nature of being. She normalizes hijiab so that it can be studied, not as some kind of weird, exotic, oppressive, sui generis piece of cloth, but like any other piece of women’s clothing, like mini-skirts, jeans, high heels, or the bra: While modest clothing can indeed be used as a form of social control or as a display of religious orthodoxy, in practice, it is both much less and much more. Much less, because for many Muslim women, it is simply what they wear. Much more, because like all clothing, Muslim women’s clothing is diverse, both historically and geographically, and is connected with much broader cultural systems. (1) Katherine BullockLecturer, Department of Political ScienceUniversity of Toronto at Mississauga

The essay focuses on the examination of a selection of children’s picture books on the theme of clothing as an element of identity and as a means of personal and social transformation. The gender stereotype has always deprived children of the freedom to imagine themselves different from the imposed social model. Modern quality literature aims to free childhood from these constraints through stories that encourage the free expression of one's personality. "Clothing and childhood" is one of the binomial in which these themes appear most evident. While developing different plots, each selected book tells a story enriched by several levels of reading, more or less evident, and this is also due to particularly accurate illustrations, capable of adding further nuances to the text. Furthermore, even if characterized by the symbolic presence of clothes, these picture books do not make them the narrative fulcrum. In each of these case studies, clothing becomes a pretext for a journey of self-discovery and affirmation of one's individuality in the world. These case studies are a concrete example of the potential of the picture book as a vehicle of complex concepts and stratifications of complementary or parallel meanings that emerge from the dynamic relationship of the text with the image. Each double page opens multiple, free interpretative paths that can be taken at each reading, as the eye catches new aspects and the thought opens up to new discoveries. The imaginary dress is therefore one of the many parallel topics that it was possible to address through these books, with which the possible interpretations of clothing in children's literature have been explored, highlighting above all how much garments are objects charged with metasignification or with projections of a identity in formation such as the one of children.

‘A Nun’s dress is a very becoming one’, wrote Cornelius Cayley in 1772. Similarly, Philip Thicknesse, witnessing the clothing ceremony at the English Augustinian convent in Paris, observed that the nun’s dress was ‘quite white, and no ways unbecoming … [it] did not render her in my eyes, a whit less proper for the affections of the world’. This tendency to objectify nuns by focusing on the mysterious and sexualized aspects of conventual life was a key feature of eighteenth-century British culture. Novels, poems and polemic dwelt on the theme of the forced vocation, culminating in the dramatic portrayals of immured nuns in the Gothic novels of the 1790s. The convent was portrayed as inherently despotic, its unnatural hierarchy and silent culture directly opposed to the sociability which, in Enlightenment thought, defined a civilized society. This despotic climate was one aspect of a culture of tyranny and constraint, which rendered nuns either innocent and victimized or complicit and immoral. Historians have noted that these stereotypes were remarkably similar to those applied to the Orient and have thus extended Said’s notion of ‘otherness’ - the self-affirmation of a dominant culture as a norm from which other cultures deviate – to apply not merely to oriental cultures but to those aspects of European culture deemed exotic. In so doing, they have challenged the notion that travel writing was an exact record of social experience and have initiated a more nuanced understanding of textual convention and authorial experience. For historians of eighteenth-century Britain this has led to an examination of the construction of anti-Catholicism within travel literature and its use as an ideology around which the Protestant nation could unite. Thus, Jeremy Black has noted that anti-Catholicism remained the ‘prime ideological stance in Britain’ and has claimed that encounters with Catholicism by British travellers in France ‘excited fear or unease … and, at times, humour or ridicule’. Likewise, Bryan Dolan and Christopher Hibbert have seen encounters with continental convents culminating in negative descriptions of rituals, relics and enclosed space.

Dress is used by transgender and nonbinary (TNB) individuals as a way to develop and maintain identity, whether to reinforce a binary gender code or disrupt social expectations. However, safety issues of living in a society where TNB persons are discriminated against, harassed, and assaulted, and where binary gender violations are met with resistance, creates tension between expression of authentic gender identity and navigation of social systems. A framework for creating an aesthetic identity based on dress and identity development scholarship was created and used to analyze responses from interviews with 90 TNB individuals located in the United States, Canada, and Ireland. Findings revealed the dialectic tension between performativity and safety. The framework explores aesthetic identity through concepts including sensory, cognitive, and emotional aspects of clothing; scaffolding and feedback; role making and role taking; and exploration and commitment. Limitations and future research are discussed.

This thesis attempts to survey the function of clothing adornment practices as a form social communication. It is shown that clothing enables the formation and distinction of social groups. The ways in which clothing becomes symbolic for a group and the way in which this system is challenged and/or destroyed are also examined. A distinction between fashion and antifashion is made to enable a repositioning of the Western system of dress into a wider context of meaning. Assumptions on the nature of appearance as related to the concept of truth are examined. Chapter One looks at the various and contradictory myths of body ideals, challenging the opposition of nature and culture. Chapter Two examines the uniform and applies its characteristics to all forms of dress. Chapter Three provides a brief summary of the history of sumptuary laws and how they operate in the social world. Throughout this work, common sense assumptions and privileged reading of particular theoretical frameworks are challenged. Theory itself is subject to fashion, allowing for a comparison to be made between human adornment and the methodologies that attempt to define its practices.

The purpose of this research was to determine and compare the dimensions of clothing interest between Afrikaans female clothing and textile students at The University of Pretoria and female clothing and textile students at Virginia Tech. An additional objective was to test the validity of the measuring instrument by factor analysis. Dimensions of clothing interest for the two groups were measured with the Gurel-Creekmore Clothing Interest Questionnaire, as revised and shortened by Borsari in 1978. T-tests indicated that the group mean scores differed significantly for three of the five dimensions. The Virginia Tech sample had a higher score on the interest and the self-concept dimensions while the Pretoria sample had a higher mean score on the modesty dimension. The factor structure for the American group was very similar to that established by Borsari in 1978 but differences existed for the structure of the South African group.
Master of Science

The purpose of the study was to investigate Oriental women's clothing acquisition behaviors and to compare their body measurements with the measurements listed in Voluntary Product Standard, PS 42-70. A questionnaire was administered to 101 Oriental women residing in Tucson, Arizona. Thirty-nine body measurements were taken from each subject in the sample. The major type of store used most frequently was department store. It appears that Oriental women were not impulsive buyers or influenced by suggestive selling techniques but highly represented careful shopping characteristics. Fit was the most important consideration in purchasing a garment. Newspapers were the major information source of fashion for Oriental women. A significant fitting problem area appeared in garment length when Oriental women purchased ready-to-wear. Bigger differences were found in vertical than the circumference body measurements for Oriental women when the mean of body measurements was compared with the PS 42-70 measurements.

This research investigated the relationships between clothing interest and self-perception among scoliosis patients and their non-handicapped peers. The objectives were (1) to investigate the differences in selected clothing interest factors and self-perception domains between female adolescents with scoliosis and non-handicapped female adolescents and (2) to investigate relationships between clothing interests and self-perception among female adolescents with scoliosis and non-handicapped female adolescents.

Data were obtained from 70 female adolescents of which 35 had scoliosis and 35 were non-handicapped. A clothing inventory, developed by Creekmore in 1963 and revised by Borsari in 1978, titled "Dimensions of Clothing Interest," was used to measure clothing dimensions of interest, conformity, modesty, psychological awareness, and self concept.

A second instrument, the "Self-Perception Profile for Adolescents", developed by Harter in 1988, was used to measure five domains of self-perception which were: social acceptance, athletic competence, romantic appeal, physical attractiveness, and global self-worth.

Master of Science

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between clothing conformity and personality type according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), of a selected group of adult males. Past research indicated that the MBTI had been used in relation to many characteristics such, as creativity, management style, and conformity. Clothing conformity had been investigated in relation to group membership and self-esteem. The researcher was unable to find any research done prior to this study in which clothing conformity and the MBTI had been used to study the relationship between personality type and clothing conformity. The sample consisted of 83 fraternity men from four Greek organizations at Georgia State University. Each respondent filled out the MBTI questionnaire, a clothing conformity scale, and a demographic form. A two to the fourth factorial ANOVA was used to analyze the relationships between clothing conformity scores and various personality types. The results indicated a significant difference in clothing conformity between extraverted and introverted personality types, with extraverts being more conforming than introverts. It also indicated a tendency for judging types to be more conforming than perceiving types. Although not statistically significant, the analysis showed some interaction effect between the extraversion-introversion and the thinking feeling dimensions on clothing conformity. The conclusions from this research are that the extraverts are more conforming in their clothing behavior than introverts, that judging personality types tend to be more conforming than perceiving types, and that the interaction between extraversion-introversion and thinking-feeling shows a tendency for the dependency of one dimension on the other.
Master of Science

Female teenagers have been found to be the most affluent teens according to the Rand Youth Poll's nationwide survey. The survey finds the average weekly income from female teens age 16 to 19 to be $82, with $50 from earnings and the balance from their allowances. Other findings from the survey indicate that adolescent girls receive more than adolescent males in allowance from parents, as mothers understand the need for the female teen to have the income necessary to purchase clothing and cosmetics. Past research studies have attempted to measure the influence sources on teenagers when purchasing clothing by asking teens to rank different influence sources or by asking the teens who accompany them when shopping. The current research study develops a structural equation model that allows for the comparison of the three predominant influence sources identified in the consumer socialization literature, i.e., parental influence, peer influence, and promotional communications sought out by the teen. To test the model, 206 randomly selected female teenagers completed a mail questionnaire regarding the influences on clothing interest. The female teens were all members of a non-denominational youth group, age 13 to 19, living in the North Texas region. The model derived is only the third model in the marketing literature to examine the consumer socialization process, and the first in fifteen years. Examining the three main influence sources identified from consumer socialization literature, peer, parent, and media sources, the results differ from past models. The female teens perceive parental influence as a negative influence on clothing interest, contrary to past findings. Peers and media are perceived as positive influences on teen clothing interest as in past models. The results signify the need for marketing researchers to continue to investigate the dynamic nature of consumer socialization.

This study investigated significant influences including Hispanicness, traditionalism and demographic characteristics on Hispanic women's purchase behavior when selecting work and social activity apparel. A sample of 114 Hispanic women from a Hispanic professional organization or businesses in the Dallas and El Paso, Texas areas. Surveys were collected by mail or administered to subjects. Analyses included frequencies, percentages, t-tests, and Pearson's product-moment correlations. For both situations, mean scores indicated the most influential information sources were: clothing displays, friends, and female family members, while the most used acquisition sources were: department and specialty stores. In both situations, these women had very feminine appearance attributes and very feminine and fashionable clothing style. Hispanicness, traditionalism, and demographic characteristics made some difference when selecting work and social activity apparel.

The purpose of this research was to establish the relationship between the stylistic changes the men's business suit and the masculine roles as represented in advertising imagery in the United States from 1950 through 1988. The men's business suit is a behavioral expectation for business and professional men often called "white collar workers." The suits are a social product given to change as collective tastes are manifest over time. The masculine role, a set of behavioral expectations dictated by consensus, is also a social product given to change over time. This research examined the relationship between changes in styling of men's business suits, and changes in masculine roles apparent in advertising.

A content analysis of men's business suits was executed to quantify the stylistic expressions, manifest in the structural components of the business suit. The classic appearance was represented by a composite illustration and was used as a device against which to compare the dominant style traits apparent in business suits for each decade researched. A survey of advertising and editorial spreads in The New York Times, Esquire and Vogue was combined with a survey of scholarly literature on gender and masculine roles to determine the pervasive masculine roles for each decade.
Master of Science

This work will try to follow the development of the iconography of Blessed Giovanni Colombini from the first images handed down to us throughout the XV century. By reading the hagiographic sources, we will try to go back to when the choice of the Jesuati habit started and whether this remains unchanged over the years. The iconographic evidences will be of help to this end. The change in Colombini's social status led him to a radical change in his clothing, which, for some aspects, is very close to that of penitents. We will also try to understand what influence the decision (made towards the mid-XIV century) of Pope Urban V had on the Jesuati habit and therefore on the iconography of Giovanni Colombini, as regards the dress of the ‘povari di Christo’.

Chapter 2 draws on theories of the body, gender performativity, and dress, to show how gender was inscribed on the body to create the appearance of difference, which, in turn, shaped all social relations. The chapter analyzes aspects of indigenous gender ideology and concepts of the body as expressed in life-cycle rituals, native-language metaphors and terminology, and beliefs pertaining to the calendar, tonalism, and nahualism. The chapter argues that concepts concerning the fluidity of the body and gender identity undermined essentializing ideologies. The work examines the construction of gender through labor, drawing on Nahua and Bènizàa rituals as two central case studies. The chapter also considers clothing and adornment and speech and behavior, which served as mechanisms to stabilize the body and impose identity. Chapter 2 concludes with a discussion of cross-gendering which occurred when individuals adopted the dress, labor roles, and mannerisms of the “opposite sex.”