Female College Students' Perception of Appropriate Colors for Selected Dress Styles and its Relationships with their Style-Image/Color-Image Congruity

Abstract

This study examined female college students' perception of appropriate colors to selected dress styles. The subjects were provided with six drawings of dress styles and color cards (11 hues for 5 tones and 5 neutral colors), and were asked to choose two colors they perceived appropriate for each dess style and two ones inappropriate. The images of each stimulus drawing, the most or the least appropriate colors were also rated on a semantic differential scale.
Frequency distributions of colors selected for each dress style were computed and those of the colors which were grouped into hue or tone categories were also performed. Chi-square analysis of the data indicated there was a significant difference in distributions of the appropiate or the inappropriate hue or tone.
Analysis for the relationship between perceived appropriateness of colors and style-image/color-image congruity showed that the image of the most appropriate colors was more congruent with dress style image than that of the least appropriate colors for each of six dress styles.