To identify important factors for designing clothing shop windows, we have compared clothing shop windows in Kansai district, Japan to those in Italy. Photographs of windows have been used for samples. The photographs had been taken in several cities in Kansai district including Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe as well as in several Italian cities, i.e., Milano, Verona, Venezia, Firenze and Roma between March and May in 2001. Types of construction and forms of the shop windows have been classified and displayed items have been compared. Subjective evaluation have been conducted with the semantic differential method by female undergraduates as evaluators. The following results have been obtained.
Clothing, supplementary items, inter-environmental items, construction type, purpose and exhibi-tion form have been included in an important factor. Especially, many Italian clothing shop windows have a brand-oriented image as the purpose factor, while many shop windows in Kansai district, Japan have a sales-oriented image.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the conformity of suits worn by women of about twenty years old with wearing scenes. Female university students participated in the experiment. The female students have evaluated the conformity of thirty samples composed of the suits worn by about twenty years old women in a variety of wearing scenes. The presented thirty samples are made of color cards and the wearing scenes. The conformity has been evaluated at five levels, from“5 (extremely suitable) ”to“1 (extremely unsuitable) ”. Evaluated values were analysed by using t-test and analysis of variance. As a result, regardless of the presentation procedure of the samples, a constant relationship has been found between color of suits and wearing scenes. Also, the dressing image and the individual color of suits influ-enced the evaluation of conformity. It has become clear that the clothing norm on wearing scenes and the dressing image were factor of the conformity.

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In a previous report, we examined the difference between the visual assessment of Japanese and Thai observers for colour fastness. A significant difference between two countries was found. Therefore, it is very important to examine whether the same tendency exists for other countries. In this report, data of Hong Kong were included in addition to those of Japan and Thailand. We carried out the same experi-ment as the previous one and compared the results of the visual assessments among the three countries. The properties of the visual assessment in each country for staining and change in colour were obtained.
Because the difference among individuals and countries can not be avoided in the visual assessment, the instrumental method is more desirable, and the several objective methods have been proposed. We examined the relationship between the visual assessment of each country and the instrumental assess-ment.
When comparing the visual assessments to the instrumental assessments for each of the three countries, the differences are greater than those between visual assessments of any two countries. There-fore, if we could develop a formula fit well using data from a country, it would be possible for this formula to be used in the other countries.
From the results obtained in this study, we suggest the use of the instrumental assessment method instead of the visual assessment. Thus, the dependency of the colour fastness assessment on the indi-victuals and countries can be avoided.

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