The everyday aesthetics of fashion: The individual, social, and contextual factors underlying everyday clothing choices

While fashion is one of the most commonplace and accessible aesthetic activities, the literature on empirical aesthetics presents a fairly scant picture of fashion preference and its predictors. In this talk, I will provide an overview of this topic, supplemented by a series of empirical studies. First, I will introduce the preference structure of clothing styles, referred to as the Everyday Clothing Preference Factors (ECPF), and discuss the roles of personality (e.g., Big 5), demographics (e.g., age and gender), fashion-related variables (e.g., the perceived function of clothing), and culture (i.e., the UK vs. the USA) in shaping everyday clothing choices. This section will draw on published works by Hur, Etcoff, and Silva (2023) and Hur, Segal, Etcoff, and Silva (2025). Next, I will present several ongoing research studies examining contextual actors that influence clothing preferences, such as the attractiveness of the wearer’s face (in the context of rating visual images of dresses), experimentally manipulated prior exposure to particular garments, and situational expectations.