Exegesis (MA--Art and Design)--AUT University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references. Also held in print (97 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm.) in the Archive at the City Campus (T 746.92 LAR)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1974. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 396-417). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

<p> In 1916, Ellen Quinlan Donnelly aka Nelly Don started a fashion empire from her humble Kansas City home. She became one of the wealthiest and most celebrated American women in business with a career that spanned well into the 1960s. The Nelly Don Empire reportedly sold more dresses in the 20th century than any other single person in the United States, and she started as a Lindenwood College student. </p><p> This study investigated Nell Quinlan Donnelly the &ldquo;Grand Lady&rdquo; of the garment industry beyond her millionaire status and revolutionary business leadership at Donnelly Garment Company. The reexamination of Nell Quinlan Donnelly&rsquo;s 60 year relationship with Lindenwood College began in 1907 as the first married student to attend. Donnelly graduated in 1909 with a Seminary Diploma and later became a phenomenal business, civic, and educational leader. </p><p> The significance of Nell Quinlan Donnelly&rsquo;s relationship with Lindenwood College has been identified by her recognition of the changing role of young women post World War II. Donnelly, a visionary leader, and a member of the Lindenwood Board of Directors and several other administrative boards, encouraged developing programs that focused on mathematics and computer science. Donnelly challenged Lindenwood education leaders with the idea of &ldquo;reaching beyond traditional confines of Liberal Arts programs and to expand student experiences that would offer &lsquo;unlimited opportunities&rsquo; for young women&rdquo; (Lindenwood Board of Director notes 1944 &amp; 1962; Ebling &amp; Kavanaugh, 1980). The foresight of &ldquo;unlimited opportunities&rdquo; afforded to young women as envisioned by Nell Quinlan Donnelly would prove her to be a woman ahead of her time and one of Lindenwood&rsquo;s most loyal and dedicated educational leaders.</p><p>

<p> English-speaking conservative Mennonites exercise a distinct set of dress practices that are not often understood by people outside the community. Advances in New Literacy Studies pave the way to understand their dress practices as a type of literacy. Multiple literacies work together to inform conservative Mennonite dress practices. One of these literacies is the reading and writing of religious texts. A second literacy is a form of heritage literacy where clothing functions as a multimodal text. Conservative Mennonites use their clothing to codify their Christian identity, gender roles and church affiliation. They intend their clothing to represent who they are to the people around them. A conservative Mennonite woman's head covering is a subversive, embodied text that corrects power imbalances they perceive between masculine and feminine. The results of viewing Mennonite dress practices through the lens of literacy show them to be a coherent sign system that passes between generations. </p><p>

Multisensory perception is fundamental to the wearer’s experience of everyday dress, yet this remains an under-researched area within fashion and dress studies. Dress is predominantly described in visual terms, while much less attention has been paid to other relevant sensory aspects such as; touch, sound,smell - and to a lesser degree taste - and to the ways in which these interact. Similarly, within the now established field of sensory scholarship, little attention has been paid to the topic of dress. One of the contributions of this thesis is to address the above gaps in relation to both male and female contemporary UK dress(and more generally, dress within a Western context). It also attends to the wider academic neglect of male dressed experience. This thesis draws upon sensory scholarship to bring a fresh perspective to current embodied understandings of everyday dress, thereby contributing to the field of dress studies by explicitly focussing on the sensory nature of dress. This research aims to foster an inter-disciplinary research field of ‘fashion, dress and the senses’. A new body of data, based on individual testimony around sensory experience of dress, has been collected using life-world interviews with twenty participants, both men and women, incorporating material culture analysis. Contextualised within the specific social and cultural lives of the participants, the analysis of this data is distinctive in that it weaves together material, cultural,social, phenomenological and sensory perspectives. The analysis explores how sensory engagement with dress affected both the materiality of the dress items and the participants by triggering behaviour,thoughts, memories and emotions. Felt on the boundaries of the body, dress is positioned as providing a sensory atmosphere for the wearer, one that negotiates the tensions between private and public experience, enabling the participants to push out into and pull back from the world. It is therefore argued that sensory engagement with dress is an integral part of the wearer’s everyday negotiation of the self within social life.

<p> The creation of national identity through the printed publication was historically important in developing French economic and cultural dominance. Luxury periodical publications such as <i>Gazette du Bon Ton</i> followed in the footsteps of historic predecessors in promoting French fashion and standards of taste to elite audiences at home and abroad, and editors such as Lucien Vogel, who positioned <i>Gazette du Bon Ton</i> alongside the exquisitely produced, influential fine art, decorative art, and design guides of the time, became powerful voices reporting on fashion and appropriate social etiquette during a time of profound social change. </p><p> The separation and cataloguing of individual pochoir from <i>Gazette du Bon Ton</i> has, over time, shifted the publication from rare book libraries to print, photography, and drawing collections and the classification of <i>Gazette du Bon Ton</i> pochoir as ephemera. This shift has limited our understanding of the complete publication. Prior research of <i> Gazette du Bon Ton</i> has focused primarily on the visual merits of fashion pochoir. This thesis attempts to redress that imbalance by analyzing the material components of <i>Gazette du Bon Ton</i> and reconsidering the vision of powerful editors such as Lucien Vogel in directing social narratives reflective of their time.</p><p>

<p> Building upon the Sport Experience Design (SX) framework of Funk (2017), this dissertation investigates consumer experience with activewear in different usage contexts. The intersection of user and context in the SX framework is examined by integrating the means-end chain theory of Gutman (1982) and the situation research of Belk (1975). This theoretical integration creates a conceptual approach to understand how consumers construct and evaluate the sport experience in different contexts. Three research questions were asked about what types of perceptions consumers develop with activewear, how the perceptions form the means-end chain structure, and how the structure varies across fitness and non-fitness contexts. Findings of Study 1 revealed five important attributes (i.e., fashion design, color and pattern, fit, functional design, and fabric), four consequences (i.e., physical appearance, physical comfort, social relationship, and task facilitation), and three end-state values (i.e., fun and enjoyment, self-respect, and sense of accomplishment) that connect and form the means-end chain structure. Informed by findings of Study 1, Study 2 found the direction of means-end chain structure and its specific paths vary across fitness and non-fitness contexts. Findings contribute to the SX framework by using the means-end chain theory as a theoretical approach to examine consumers&rsquo; experience with a sport product while considering the context in which the product is used. Practical implications are provided on how brands can link product attributes with consumers&rsquo; self-concepts to enhance the consumer experience.</p><p>

<p> The Presidential Inaugural Ball is a special moment for every president&rsquo;s wife because it is her first official public appearance as first lady of the United States. Historically, the manner in which the first lady presents herself in the way she dresses often contributes to her public image. Scrutiny from the media includes a focus on what she wears to the inauguration, as well as examination and analysis of her inaugural ball gown that evening. The gowns have a tradition of setting the tone for the first lady in the new administration as well as providing glimpses of a first lady&rsquo;s personality. The gown gives the world a look at her personal style and a glimpse at her potential influence on fashion trends. Most first ladies recognize and understand the expectations of the role and what it means to the public. Some, however, have questioned why their appearance should matter so long as they are true to themselves. In positions of power, though, appearances are important because the media can use fashion as a lens to filter and interpret information to the public. Research on the news media coverage of first ladies and their inaugural gowns identified four themes: Feminism and the media&rsquo;s reflection of society&rsquo;s changing views of the first lady&rsquo;s role; the media&rsquo;s descriptions of first ladies, specifically references to their dress sizes and their physique; ethnocentrism and the fashion industry&rsquo;s unbridled interest in and reliance on what the first lady wears; and the perspective of moderation in that the inaugural gown should be nice but not too expensive. Each theme has an intrinsic news value interjected into that coverage as revealed by Herbert J. Gans: Individualism, altruistic democracy, ethnocentrism, and moderatism, respectively. The media&rsquo;s tendency to fixate on the first lady&rsquo;s fashion style and clothing choices is best described as a fascination, almost an obsession at times, beginning with her selection of the inaugural gown. This thesis examines newspaper and magazine coverage and reaction to inaugural gowns from First Ladies Jackie Kennedy in 1961 to Michelle Obama in 2009.</p><p>

<p> The popularity of the iPhone generated a barrage of digital comments, complaints, and articles about how the trendy phone didn&rsquo;t fit in women&rsquo;s pockets, from articles like the one in <i>the Atlantic</i> titled &ldquo;The Gender Politics of Pockets&rdquo; to a vlog called &ldquo;Girl Pockets&rdquo; by popular vlogger Hank Green. Why are women protesting about the inadequacy of their pockets, and how is this indicative of sexism and inequality? An examination of the gendered history of pockets answers this question, and is rooted in the literature of the Victorian era. I use thing theory to reveal how the pocket was both an agent and a symbol of economic change in this period. This dissertation considers the importance of the pocket, not only as an item of fashion, but also as an object that carried symbolic and representative meanings in Victorian society.</p><p> Much like women&rsquo;s fashion in general, pockets in the Victorian period were used as disciplinary forces. The increase in technology and the rise in consumerism meant that women were leaving the house, and a female buying force became immensely important to the British economy. Part of the effort to counter this threat was to make women&rsquo;s fashion debilitating and limiting. As the receptacle of money and object of convenience to a mobile shopper, the pocket was an important part of the effort to curtail feminine power, and this can be seen in Victorian literature. A fashionable woman was forced to use separate tie-pockets, which were exposed to theft or ransacking, and were also inconvenient. This meant that women&rsquo;s pockets were more vulnerable, and in economic and psychological terms, women suffered for this. The comparison with men&rsquo;s easily accessible and secure pockets worked to reassert the traditional hierarchy in the Victorian patriarchal system. Consequently a tension was created: the female shopper represented a much-needed potential economic force, but because of the threat to patriarchy that she represented, this force was constantly being constrained and controlled.</p><p> Through an examination of Victorian literature, art, and advertisements, we can see that women&rsquo;s pockets, then as now, were unsatisfactory.</p><p>

The superior financial performance of retailers who utilise Fast Fashion strategies have focussed attention on these methods while simultaneously pressurising other retailers to follow suit. Fast Fashion refers to strategies employed by retailers to meet frequently changing consumer tastes and demands by optimising their design and production processes. This study aimed to determine the applicability of Fast Fashion in South Africa by conducting a study of consumers who frequent fashion retail stores. The literature review indicated that there were four key Fast Fashion variables that were related to consumer behaviour: Renewal Cycles, Supply, Quality and Price. The findings showed that Renewal Cycles and Price are key variables for consumers in fashion retail, affecting the frequency of purchases and store visits. The implication of this result is that retailers who implement Fast Fashion strategies would do best by selecting strategies that directly impact these key variables. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted