Abstract
With women enjoying higher levels of education and social status today, differentiation between the masculine and the feminine is becoming less and less apparent. In modern society the desirability of certain clothing images reflects such changes accordingly. First, in order to measure and analyze the clothing images as described above, a scale that is suitable for this particular research was developed by examining the factor structure of desirable images of male and female clothing. The measurement scale for the desirability of clothing images consists of five dimensions, (beauty-sensitivity, conspicuous, casualness, refinement and conservative). Six items for each dimension were chosen. The internal coherence of the scale terms selected was ascertained by calculating Cronbach's a coefficient. Its values showed a high rate of more than 0.72 for each dimension. Next, male and female clothing images were measured by using a developed scale. It could be concluded that “casualness”and “refinement”were both recognized as important dimensions for clothing images for both male and female. However, the “conservative”dimension was of minor importance for both male and female. In particular, image scores higher than average (4) were observed in the fashionable of the “conspicuous”for both male and female clothing. Higher scores were also observed in the “refinement”and “casualness”dimensions. As a result, it may be noted that the clothing images for both male and female are becoming similar. By way of the analyses and measurement as realized by the scale developed in this study, the desirability of clothing images, as described above, may be more easily understood.
