Abstract
An attempt was made to examine the effects of stripe direction and background colour of the striped dress upon the apparent lengths and the visual impressions. For this purpose, dress-forms wearing one-piece dresses with vertical or horizontal pencil-stripes were utilized for the visual examination. Throughout the dresses used all the stripes had the same line width and common colour (in this case, black) and background of the dresses had two different colours (yellow and blue). The apparent lengths were estimated by paired comparison method. Subjects rated the impressions on 12 semantic differential scales for each item, and the data were factor-analyzed.
The results are summarized as follows :
1) The direction of stripes influenced the apparent lengths of the vertical and the horizontal body lines. Contrary to Helmholtz theory the body lines along the direction of the stripes were perceived as elongated but those perpendicular to the direction of the stripes were seen as shorter than their actual length. The composite effect of the stripes explains the general impression that the dresses with the wearers will look like taller by wearing the dresses with vertical stripes.
2) Of the 12-pair scales on the impression, two pairs (fat and slender, simple and complicated) were significantly influenced by the stripe direction. This results agree well with those obtained in the past studies. Also the four pairs (loudly and quiet, light and heavy, static and dynamic, warm and cold) were predominantly affected by the general impression of the background colour.
