Meanings of Clothing Cues in Social Context

Abstract

39and delivery surety or foreign suppliers with lower prices and quota restrictions.A new career of textile and apparel exporter is opening and poses exciting challenges for the entrepreneurial minded student.Professors of textiles and apparel should not align themselves with a rigid position in the complex subject of international trade in textiles and apparel. They would be remiss if they were not aware of the many facets of the problem and the fact that students entering the various segments of the field need to be objectively informed about all sides of the problem.For over ten years, the United States has tried through multilateral and bilateral agreements to resolve the problems of trade in textiles and apparel with developing nations. First, through the LTA, then the MFA and many bilateral arrangements, almost constant neg-otiation has occurred.The United States government tries to take into account all sides of the issue in forming these arrangements and to that end organizes various advisory groups to give input before decisions are made. This system has worked fairly well. The domestic manufacturer cannot always be pleased, nor can the impor--ter, exporter, retailer or consumer.The decision-making process requires a careful balancing ofëompeting interests to reach acceptable solutions. In the final analysis a precarious balance is reached between protecting U.S. jobs and promoting free trade.This study was an investigation of the effect of interpersonal context—similarities and contrasts in apparel worn by two interacting persons-upon person and relationship perception. Male and female employees of private businesses (N=64) describd what they thought was happening in four different pictures of office settings inwhich a male and female stimulus person each wore formal or informal business apparel. Verbal responses were categorized according to a system tailor-made to classify content of the descriptions. Analysis of variance of content distributions indicated that men and women wearing suuits were more often assigned management roles than were persons in casual attire. Contrasts in formal versus casual clothing were also meaningful in that 1) male and female persons wearing suits more often were described as higher in rank when their adjacent companion wore casual clothing; 2) men in suits wee described as giving more directive, rewarding, or punishing communications to women in casual dress; 3) men wearing suits were described as having more positive feelings when pictured with a casually dressed woman; 4) male persons were assigned more "activity" traits when pictured with a formally dressed woman; 5) dyads in which the man wore a suit and the woman wore casual clothing received more descriptions of involvement in personal versus business mattes. Clothing shown in the context of social interaction provided a much broader range of information than previously studied in dress perception research.This study was an investigation of the effect of interpersonal contextsimilarities and contrasts in a...

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