Abstract

Middle age is the time of the most important meaning in life and also the time of physical and mental change, which offers new social activities for self-development. Middle-aged women form the major consumer class in current clothing industry, but few have been performed on this so far. The researcher studied in many aspect on the clothes which middle-aged women need to wear during this period of change. Thus this study is executed to examine what benefits middle-aged women pursue in clothing attitudes and the relationship among clothing pursuit benefit and their somatotype compensation and image orientation. The research performed the theoretical study and practical study simultaneously. The subjects are 238 middle-aged women between 35 and 49 years old in September, 2004. The results of this study are as follows: 1. The attitude of women's clothing patterns in relation with image consist of two factor structures. One is the body image and the other is the appearance image. 2. As a result of researching the attitude for choosing clothes of each body group by Rohrer index, the women with gross body group take a top priority for the lower-body compensation, while the women with slim body group take a top priority for volume compensation. 3. As a result of researching the cognitive somatotype group's attitude for choosing clothes, gross body group takes a top priority for lower-body compensation and upper-body compensation. 4. As a result of researching the relationship between real somatotype and cognitive somatotype by Rohrer index, middle-aged women think of themselves as being fatter than present state. And choosing the clothes, the body misunderstanding group of women usually show that they consider more compensation than the normally body understanding group. 5. The evaluation on real somatotype, cognitive somatotype, ideal somatotype influences on the body cathexis.

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