In China, an increasing number of individuals and companies are adopting microblogging, a popular form of social media, in order to connect and interact with other people, and recent online events indicate the power of microblogging in Chinese society. Holding the belief that microblogging brings out the interactive nature of new media as well as the audiences, many companies are exploring microblogging in order to better communicate with their audiences. However, very little is known about how those brands use microblogging to promote themselves and what the audiences’ preferences are on this platform. Employing uses and gratifications and feminism theories, this study examined how fashion brands use Weibo.com, one of the main microblogging platforms in China, to promote themselves and what the Chinese women, the main audience of both Weibo.com and fashion brands, ask for from fashion brands’ tweets. The quantitative content analysis of the tweets of three major fashion brands, namely Burberry, Louis Vuitton, and Bvlgari, shows the general pattern of how microblogging are being deployed. A further investigation was conducted through ethnographic content analysis in order to examine the implicit values conveyed by fashion brand’s tweets and the audiences’ preferences towards these values. Results from the analyses revealed that the prevailing topics covered in the fashion brands’ tweets included their products, related celebrities, and the brands’ events or projects, and fashion brands usually combined several topics in one tweet in order to provide more information to the audiences. Taken a deeper look at the latent message of the tweets, fashion appears to play a positive role in emancipating contemporary Chinese women.

This dissertation investigates the cultural meaning ascribed to feminine fashionable objects such as gloves, fans, parasols and vanity sets. I pay particular attention to issues of middle-class formation, the performance of gender, and the materiality of race, empire and colonialism. While these issues lie at the heart of British historiography, this project is written from a unique perspective which privileges cultural artifacts through material culture analysis. While the emergence of the middle class is typically studied as a masculine/public phenomenon, this project corrects the overemphasis on male activity by showing that middle-class women created a distinctive ‘look’ for their class via the consumption of specific goods and through participation in daily beauty rituals. Adding to these ideas, I argue that Victorian women performed a distinct type of femininity represented as passivity, asexuality, innocence, and leisure. By studying the repetitive gestures, poses and consumption practices of middle-class women, I show that certain corporeal acts helped to create Victorian femininity. This work also suggests that women participated in the British colonial project by consuming objects that were represented in the Victorian imagination as imperial spoils. As such, I argue that imperialism penetrated the everyday lives of Britons through several everyday objects. Empire building also created anxieties surrounding questions of race. Women’s accessories, such as gloves and parasols, helped British women to maintain their whiteness, an important way of distinguishing the ‘civilized’ Britons from the ‘uncivilized’ tanned colonial peoples. Overall this project showed that within the everyday objects consumed by women we can identify the anxieties, hopes and dreams of Victorians.

This dissertation investigates the cultural meaning ascribed to feminine fashionable objects such as gloves, fans, parasols and vanity sets. I pay particular attention to issues of middle-class formation, the performance of gender, and the materiality of race, empire and colonialism. While these issues lie at the heart of British historiography, this project is written from a unique perspective which privileges cultural artifacts through material culture analysis. While the emergence of the middle class is typically studied as a masculine/public phenomenon, this project corrects the overemphasis on male activity by showing that middle-class women created a distinctive ‘look’ for their class via the consumption of specific goods and through participation in daily beauty rituals. Adding to these ideas, I argue that Victorian women performed a distinct type of femininity represented as passivity, asexuality, innocence, and leisure. By studying the repetitive gestures, poses and consumption practices of middle-class women, I show that certain corporeal acts helped to create Victorian femininity. This work also suggests that women participated in the British colonial project by consuming objects that were represented in the Victorian imagination as imperial spoils. As such, I argue that imperialism penetrated the everyday lives of Britons through several everyday objects. Empire building also created anxieties surrounding questions of race. Women’s accessories, such as gloves and parasols, helped British women to maintain their whiteness, an important way of distinguishing the ‘civilized’ Britons from the ‘uncivilized’ tanned colonial peoples. Overall this project showed that within the everyday objects consumed by women we can identify the anxieties, hopes and dreams of Victorians.

When we talk about shopping for garments, we mostly think of women first. Men also shop, need clothes, spend time and money in stores and dress in various fashion styles. That is why we decided to explore men’s attitudes and behavior in a garment shopping experience. Our main focus was men’s experience when buying fashionable garments. The thesis is based on investigation within the area of consumer behavior and its focal point is on men, shopping and how do they feel when they shop. In the study we conducted various qualitative researches which are participant observation method along with a short interview and a focus group method that helped us to get deeper into men’s mind and their perception of shopping and fashion in general. We have also conducted library research in order to obtain more data and information about previous studies made in the same field. While collecting all the possible data for this study, we tried to keep a visible link between our empirical findings and the collected library data. Results of the study identified four key traits that greatly help in defining men shopping experience as rather enjoyable or not. These traits are time consumption, uncertainty aversion, prices of garments and companionship while shopping. Time consumption and uncertainty aversion have been indicated as central traits which, in a right balance, can characterize male shopping experience as more pleasurable. Our overall findings indicate that men are strongly represented in the global shopping arena and share their own characteristic shopping behaviour. Thus, men should not be neglected nor ignored as consumers of fashionable garments.

This research project asks; what is the potential for garments to express an Indian/European cultural hybridisation? The research explores the development of an alternative aesthetic by hybridising the ethos of traditional Indian garments and the aesthetics of 'Western' garments. The garments have been designed and constructed after key design features were indentified, and the new garments reflect hybridisation. The aspect of hybridisation was further enhanced with the use of digitally-printed fabric imagery which features a mythologised and idealised European/Indian history. The research seeks to discover if such a joining-together could develop an aesthetic sensibility, informed by both a ‘Western’ enculturation and a traditional Indian heritage. The new garments will speak to the viewer about what it is to experience being situated within two cultures simultaneously.

When we are buffeted by extreme external or internal forces, the self may splinter and spiral in a psychological maze of disengagement and lost sovereignty. This trans-disciplinary design project responds – operating between fashion, performance and film – and acts out Elaine Scarry’s contention that pain can be constructively re-made. Functioning as a metaphorical problem-solving space where the textures of inner experience are explored, this project employs fragmented narrative and theatrical re-fashioning of the environment and body to attain greater social relevance. It asks how can we reconnect with the ‘sovereign self’ when our constitutional confidence has been eroded and how do we re-engage with the outside world once we have become psychologically estranged from it? The Interior Cinematic utilises cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter’s formulation of the self as a ‘strange loop’, and Louis A. Sass’ explanation of the dissociative and recursive features of schizophrenia as a point of poetic departure for understanding the damaged and dissociated self. The lost self may seem like an end - a horrific freefall out of normal life into madness and estrangement. But it is also a beginning; the pinnacle of sensory ascendency - a beautiful, lateral, life affirming state. Through The Interior Cinematic I construct an aesthetics of reengagement: an affective pathway between these contradictory and overlapping existential poles, contending that the lost self can, in part, be recovered through a rediscovery of sensation. This work is informed by Julia Kristeva’s assertion that alienation is the kernel for empathetic re-engagement with others, as well as by Arthur Frank’s theory of narrative as a strategy to reconnect with the damaged self.

The purpose and underlying motivation for this project was to examine the procedure of garment construction methods, by specifically choosing to abandon traditional rules and standards that are associated with mass production. I chose to explore domestic hand-craft made by women in New Zealand in their domestic situation, focusing on hand-stitched techniques from the past reflecting a nostalgic value which potentially contributed to the garment’s construction process. The project sought to utilize the re-using of materials by incorporating previously made hand-craft; and looked at the remaking of second-hand garments by means of deconstruction and reconstruction. Traditional hand-craft, in this context, refers to the use of craft forms not governed by principles of efficiency, mass production or technology, allowing the garments to contain unique ‘one of a kind’ hand-made qualities. My studio practice specifically focused on exploring the relationship between hand-craft and garment construction, by researching their application and integration into the garment’s structure, along with disrupting the orderly traditional production process. I was not focusing on the finished garment’s design. The project provided an opportunity to refocus my attention on the hand-made, as I perceived that the skills required to produce these were being extinguished by modern lifestyles. Exploration promoted new discoveries by exposing the construction process and revealing unpredicted combinations. The project explored these ideas, resulting in a range of women’s garments that revealed, as part of their construction, hand-work which offered a modern variation of nostalgia. This project comprised of 80% practical work and will be accompanied by an exegesis with a value of 20%.

This research project asks; what is the potential for garments to express an Indian/European cultural hybridisation? The research explores the development of an alternative aesthetic by hybridising the ethos of traditional Indian garments and the aesthetics of 'Western' garments. The garments have been designed and constructed after key design features were indentified, and the new garments reflect hybridisation. The aspect of hybridisation was further enhanced with the use of digitally-printed fabric imagery which features a mythologised and idealised European/Indian history. The research seeks to discover if such a joining-together could develop an aesthetic sensibility, informed by both a ‘Western’ enculturation and a traditional Indian heritage. The new garments will speak to the viewer about what it is to experience being situated within two cultures simultaneously.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2007. / Principal faculty advisor: Joel Best, Dept. of Sociology & Criminal Justice. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2006. / Thesis submitted to the Division of Arts. Bibliography: leaves 333-374.