Conspicuous consumption of products is problematic for the development of a sustainable relationship to cultural and natural resources. Drawing on an emotional design approach, this study explores emotional conditions involved in the buying phase of socially visible products used in a typically expressive consumption activity. Through an extreme character approach, impulsive and compulsive buying is explored to expose principal and generic emotional conditions in the drive for new design products. The study demonstrates a range of primary negative emotional conditions or emotional fluctuations related to anxiety, mood, and self-esteem in the buying of appearance-related products. In conclusion, to achieve a more sustainable consumer relationship with fashion-conditioned material goods, the study reveals a need for unemotional design to acquire emotional detachment, rather than design to acquire emotional attachment.
This article challenges traditional ways of understanding fashion as a social phenomenon. By considering the everyday social practice of fashion where looking, wearing, choosing, discarding, consuming, and producing fashion have central roles in understanding fashion's person-object relationships, this study advances an alternative ontological view of fashion as a volatile emotional condition and inconstant state of mind. This suggested shift in theoretical perspective is significant in understanding and stimulating change or maintaining stability in fashion phenomena and could have principal consequences for thinking and
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