Fashion and "expertise" Duke U survey results

[sydnie7]

From an e-mail:

Many of you have participated in Duke University Surveys on fashion and consumption. We greatly appreciate your willingness to help us with our research, and wanted to share some of what we have learned with you.

As one part of our research, we have focused on examining how fashion expertise (brand name and logo recognition, following of trends, etc.) impacts how people view designer brands. People often think that the more of an expert one is, the more they would find high end brands fashionable. However, we have recently discovered that this effect actually works more like an upside-down U. As individuals increase in their fashion expertise, they begin to perceive designer brands as being more fashionable. However, at the highest levels of expertise, individuals tend to rate designer items as less fashionable and tend to emphasize them less in their outfits. We believe that at extremely high levels of fashion expertise, more emphasis is placed on the combination of outfits to expressing individuality than on solely designer brands. We have included a graph of some of our recent findings in the link below.


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And how does this relate to kilts? Picture the "shortbread tin" ensemble, purchased in one fell swoop, vs. individual pieces carefully collected over time and mix/matched for varying uses. IMHO, this survey is just another affirmation of the latter approach to kilted fashion.