Looking professional: How women decide what to wear with and through automated technologies

Abstract

From innovations such as virtual fit through 3D body scanning, smart clothes, wearable technology and virtual styling assistants to more mundane capabilities such as digital photography and social media, deciding what to wear and how to wear an item is now accompanied by a range of new information and perspectives. This article examines the sociotechnical systems that support everyday decisions about what to wear, and how this decision-making process is being re-imagined in response to technology. Drawing upon closet ethnographies with women in the USA and Australia, we focus upon the ways in which women make decisions about what will help them to ‘look professional’. Specifically, we attend to two key dimensions of the decision-making process – visions and validations – to understand the ways in which women weigh the opinion of other people, media and technologies, and the real and imagined role of how new technologies such as the Amazon Echo Look may be integrated into this process. Through fine-grained analysis of the ways that women receive, reject or ignore information about their performance of looking professional, we reflect upon the relative importance of different technologies in the process of decision-making.

A 3D Skeleton Points-Based Hierarchical Body Modeling Approach for Intelligent Online Clothing Fitting Systems

“…2) Outer contour of the clothing area to be deformed The acquisition of the outer contour of each area to be deformed in the clothing fitting material image is carried out in the following two steps: the first step is to determine each area to be deformed in the clothing fitting material image. Taking the personalized body shape model image as the detection object, the four personalized body shape parameter values of bust, waist, hip and shoulder width are detected, and compared with the standard model body shape parameters [18].…”