Fashion Modeling Research Articles

Florida 4-H Fashion Revue Guide

This planning guide and project report is appropriate for 4-H youth who take part in the Florida 4-H Clothing and Textiles Project. This publication offers an exploration of science and art through clothing design, engineering, technology, and craftsmanship. It contains fashion revue guidelines, interview and modeling tips, entry forms, and more.

Implications of the M-OO∙∙OO-M recombination mechanism on materials screening and the oxygen evolution reaction

Identification of active electrocatalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), corresponding to the bottleneck in electrolyzers to produce gaseous hydrogen as energy vector, by electronic structure calculations relies on the assumption of the mononuclear mechanism, comprising the *OH, *O, and *OOH intermediates. This mechanistic description is thermodynamically hampered by a scaling relation between the *OH and *OOH adsorbates, which may serve as an explanation why OER catalysts commonly require large overpotentials to reach sufficient current densities. Recently, an alternate OER pathway was proposed that, in contrast to the mononuclear description, consists of the formation of two adjacent *OO adsorbates, and gaseous oxygen is produced by chemical recombination of the neighboring *OO intermediates. In the present manuscript, a data-driven model based on a dedicated assessment of the elementary reaction steps is deduced, which enables evaluating the mononuclear and *OO pathways by the same set of parameters. Potential-dependent volcano plots are constructed to comprehend the energetics of the competing mechanisms. It is demonstrated that the alternate OER pathway consisting of the *OO∙∙*OO recombination step may excel the mononuclear description at overpotentials corresponding to typical OER conditions. Consequently, it is suggested that future studies, aiming at the identification of OER materials, may not omit the *OO∙∙*OO recombination mechanism when using concepts of materials screening in a heuristic fashion or multiscale modeling.

Transitory ties: A network ecology perspective on job opportunities in fashion modeling

Project-based and short-term employment is widespread in the contemporary labor market, yet existing theories of social capital often rely on an organizationally bound model of work and careers. In this paper, we expand this perspective by examining the case of precarious employment in a creative industry to ask, what kinds of social ties promote or constrain workers’ opportunities? We examine networks among fashion models, a case of project-based freelance labor. Using ethnographic accounts of fashion shows and castings, as well as a unique longitudinal dataset of careers and networks in fashion modeling, we develop the notion of “transitory ties” to account for the short-term, fleeting, and highly valuable social relations that models form recurrently on jobs. We adopt a network ecology perspective on transitory ties by showing how contextual factors drive their formation, and ultimately broader network structures that have tremendous consequences for models’ careers.

Building a Runway to Subjective Happiness: The Role of Fashion Modeling Classes in Promoting Seniors' Mental Well-Being.

This study focuses on senior citizens who are participating in fashion modeling classes. Modeling classes are one of the most prominent educational leisure activities that has recently garnered the attention of the elderly population. The effect of flow experience in modeling classes on perceived happiness in life was considered. Since the activities related to modeling classes are related to fashion and appearance, the mediating roles of confidence in fashion and appearance satisfaction were included as hypotheses. Survey data of 168 women aged 50 years or older were analyzed using the PROCESS macro for SPSS and SmartPLS. Flow experience was found to have a positive effect on subjective happiness, confidence in fashion, and appearance satisfaction. However, confidence in fashion had a significant impact on appearance satisfaction but not on subjective happiness. Appearance satisfaction also had a significant effect on subjective happiness. Appearance satisfaction had a significant mediation effect from flow experience to subjective happiness, but confidence in fashion did not have significant influence in the process. However, the serial multiple mediation effect through confidence in fashion and appearance satisfaction was detected to be significant from flow experience to subjective happiness. The results are expected to help establish the direction of leisure education programs for seniors and bring progress to the research agenda on the impact of fashion confidence and appearance satisfaction on senior citizens.

Analysis of clothing elements reflecting fashion trends in the collection of fashion shows

The aim of the work is to study fashion trends, to establish a set of elements through which changes are expressed in models (samples) of collections of fashion shows of clothes, and how these changes are introduced into mass production and are repeated over time. The theoretical significance of the work lies in the development of a methodology for studying clothing samples, identifying fashion trends and making forecasts. The results obtained can be used in training for the formation of competencies among specialists in the field of fashion technology, modeling and clothing design, at industry enterprises for the development of promising collections. The proposed technique was tested, elements of models and materials were identified, the use and combination of which ensures the relative novelty and integrity of the collections, forms a promising trend, which is further implemented in the mass production of clothing.

Fit models, not fat models: body inclusiveness in the U.S. fit modeling job market

ABSTRACT The extent to which the U.S. fashion industry is becoming more size- and shape- inclusive is highly contested. To assess whether or not this is occurring in women’s fashion, I draw from a content analysis of 162 online job advertisements for female fit models in the U.S. collected between 2012 and 2018. I show that fit modeling is, indeed, more size- and shape- inclusive than fashion modeling. However, when compared to the broader U.S. population, the sizes and shapes recruited in fit model ads are not inclusive. For example, only 16% of job ads recruited “plus-size” models, none recruited fit models larger than size 20/2X, and virtually all specified fit models with hourglass proportions. To the extent that fit models are selected because they mirror fashion brands’ “target customers,” these findings suggest that the U.S. fashion industry is not, in fact, becoming more size- and shape- inclusive.

여가활동 참여를 통한 시니어 패션모델의 성공적 노화 : 선택·최적화·보완(SOC) 전략 유형을 중심으로

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the experience of the senior fashion models in Korea. Specifically, we investigated the meaning of involvement in fashion modeling as a form of leisure and how it impacts successful aging using the selective optimization with compensation theoretical framework.BR Method: We used a case study research approach, and conducted in-depth interviews with 21 senior fashion models (average age=66.5).BR Results: The analysis revealed central themes that described meanings of the experience of senior fashion modeling associated with the selection, optimization, and compensation: (a) elective selection; (b) loss-based selection; (c) priority of life; (d) routinizing practice; (e) monetary investment; (f) self-management; (g) use of media; (h) cooperation with peers; (i) supplementary learning. Additional themes related to successful aging include: (a) self-confidence; (b) happiness; (c) stress relief; (d) engaging with society.BR Conclusion: We suggest that senior fashion modeling has opened doors for older adults to maintain active lifestyles which eventually led to successful aging.

Senior fashion models’ perspectives on serious leisure and successful aging

ABSTRACTStudies have revealed the positive impact of serious leisure among older adults. Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer core activity that is highly substantial, interesting, and fulfilling and where, in the typical case, participants find a career in acquiring and expressing a combination of special skills, knowledge, and experience. As serious leisure involves productive engagement and commitment, performing as a senior model reflects the serious leisure participation of older adults, which might offer a new insight into promoting healthy lifestyles. While many studies have been conducted in the context of leisure behavior of older adults, a study is yet to explore the behavior of senior fashion models. Given that serious leisure offers positive outcomes (e.g., personal growth, happiness) and demands substantial effort as and perseverance, the behavior of senior modeling can be understood using a serious leisure framework. The purpose of the study is to explore the behavior of older adults engaged in fashion modeling as a form of serious leisure. We conducted a series of face-to-face interviews with 31 participants. Interview questions focused on the participants’ perception as senior models and the meaning of being senior models. The ages of the participants ranged from 54 to 85 years (Mean age = 66.9). The constant comparison method was applied to continuously compare the views and experiences of the participants. Two central themes that shaped the participants’ senior fashion modeling experiences were identified: (1) the benefits of senior fashion modeling and (2) the costs of senior fashion modeling. Under each theme, several sub-categories were identified: confidence, stylish and ageless, friendships, painful training and investing effort, barriers associated with aging, and structural constraints. The findings obtained in this study highlight the important link between serious leisure and successful aging. Considering the benefits identified by the study participants, it is suggested that engaging in senior fashion modeling positively affects older adults’ quality of life.

Effects of socioeconomic status on clinical outcomes with ventricular assist devices.

Lower socioeconomic status (SES) is a known risk factor for worse outcomes after major cardiovascular interventions. Furthermore, individuals with lower SES face barriers to evaluation for advanced heart failure therapies, including ventricular assist device (VAD) implantation. Examination of the effects of individual determinants of SES on VAD outcomes will show similar survival benefit in patients with lower compared with higher SES. All VAD implants at the University of Florida from January 2008 to December 2015 were reviewed. Patient-level determinants of SES included place of residence, education level, marital status, insurance status, and financial resources stratified by percent federal poverty level. Survival or transplantation at 1 year, 30-day readmission, implant length of stay (LOS), and an aggregate of VAD-related complications were assessed in univariate fashion and multivariable regression modeling. A total of 111 patients were included (mean age at the time of implant 57.6 years, 82.8% men). More than half received destination therapy. At 1 year, 78.3% were alive on device support or had undergone successful transplantation. There were no differences in survival, 30-day readmission, or aggregate VAD complications by the SES category. Although patients with lower levels of education had longer LOS in univariate analysis, on multivariable ordinal regression modeling, this relationship was no longer seen. Patients with lower SES receive the same survival benefit from VAD implantation and are not more likely to have 30-day readmissions, complications of device support, or prolonged implant LOS. Therefore, VAD implantation should not be withheld based on these parameters alone.

Aesthetic objects on display: The objectification of fashion models as a situated practice

This article unravels the process of objectification by empirically examining a social context where it occurs almost incessantly: fashion modeling. Drawing on an ethnography of fashion modeling in Amsterdam, Paris and Warsaw, I argue that objectification is neither ubiquitous nor one-dimensional: it takes place in specific social contexts and unfolds itself differently under different social conditions. Moreover, objectification is not unidirectional: it is done by and happens to both men and women. By taking an experiential perspective which involves models’ subjective responses to being objectified, I call into question theoretical arguments of objectification pertaining to disempowered subjects, and the assumption that objectification is inherently negative or immoral. Instead, I argue that objectification is socially rooted in institutions and specific situations and that this matters considerably for its varying forms, levels of intensity and the emotional and practical responses it evokes in people. This does not imply that objectification is less compelling as a process, or easy to avoid. Objectification might be all the more effective exactly because the process is embedded in different social contexts, and adapts itself accordingly.

“I know I am posing”… Feeling the Pose in Post-war Fashion Modeling

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes outlines how posing for the camera is a performative act in which one lends oneself “to the social game”; therefore “I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but (to square the circle) this additional message must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality.” This article examines some of the ways in which the pose and act/action of posing have been articulated in selected accounts of post-war fashion modeling. In doing so it questions the ways in which the pose and act/action of posing may be considered in terms of what Raymond Williams terms “structures of feeling,” which is feeling as both a product of, and as productive in, social, historical, cultural and individual contexts.

Whitewashed Runways: Employment Discrimination in the Fashion Modeling Industry

Whitewashed Runways: Employment Discrimination in the Fashion Modeling Industry

This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour

This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour

She Ain't Taking It

She Ain't Taking It

패션모델의 직무스타일이 직무만족도 및 이직의도에 미치는 영향

This study analyzed the effects of job style on job satisfaction and turnover intention of fashion models, and the difference in the job style, job satisfaction and turnover intention by model activities period. Data was collected by surveying fashion models with more than 10 modeling experiences, and 230 responses were used in the data analysis. The results of were as follows: First, the job style of fashion models were classified into professional ability type, social relationship-focused type, future-oriented type and body-boasting type. Job satisfaction was classified into satisfaction with working conditions, satisfaction with model activities, and satisfaction with relationships. Turnover intention was classified into intention to change jobs, and intention to quit modeling. Second, being a professional ability type had a negative effect on satisfaction with working conditions, whereas being a future-oriented type had a positive effect on it. The professional ability type and social relationship-focused type had a positive effect on satisfaction with model activities, and the social relationship-focused type had a positive effect on satisfaction with relationships. Third, the future-oriented type and body-boasting type had a negative effect on the intention to change jobs. The social relationship-focused type, future-oriented type and body-boasting type had a negative effect on the intention to quit modeling. Fourth, there were significant differences in the professional ability type, human relationship-focused type, body-boasting type, intention to change jobs and intention to quit modeling by model activities period. Therefore, it is necessary for domestic fashion models to have the appropriate attitude to develop features and competency required for modeling projects and if improvements are made to enhance job satisfaction of fashion models, the fashion modeling industry is expected to make further developments.

The Paradoxical Value of Deviant Cases: Toward a Gendered Theory of Display Work

AbstractMajor shifts in gender, work, and sexuality have led to the rising prominence of display work, the display of sexualized bodily capital for wages. This article develops the concept of display work and examines its implications for the gendered organization of work. Display work is a continuous rather than a categorical variable and can describe a range of jobs from those involving overtly sexualized bodies for sale as bodies to professionalized bodies on display. Within the field of display work, we identify a paradox: among some display workers, women earn significantly more than men, a wage gap that reverses the enduring pattern of gendered wage inequality in the broader labor market. This article flips the typical line of inquiry by comparing earnings and career dynamics among performers in fashion modeling, pornography, and stripping, three cases of display work characterized by clear inverted wage gaps. We argue that in the field of display work, freelance and winner-take-all workplace struct...

Beauty and distinction? The evaluation of appearance and cultural capital in five European countries

To what extent do tastes in the field of beauty demarcate symbolic boundaries? This article analyzes social differences in the evaluation of the beauty of female and male faces in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and the UK. Combining Q-methodology and open interviews (N=150), it presents a quantifiable comparative measurement of ‘beauty tastes’, and a qualitative analysis of the underlying ‘repertoires of evaluation’. Four types of repertoires were found: aesthetic repertoires; subjectification versus objectification; gender-normative; and racial repertoires. Aesthetic and objectifying evaluations are typically applied to women, whereas evaluative repertoires for men are more subjectified, less aestheticizing, more overtly gendered and racial. Aesthetic repertoires reflect the opposing popular and highbrow logics well-known in cultural sociology. These repertoires resonate with the aesthetics of cultural institutions, notably fashion modeling and pornography. Regression analysis shows that these aesthetic repertoires demarcate boundaries along lines of education, age and urbanity, suggesting that they function as ‘emerging cultural capital’, applying highbrow logics beyond traditional high art fields. While nationality hardly affects the evaluation of female beauty, significant national differences are found in evaluations of male looks. Long-standing traditions of female depictions have produced more transnational stylistic conventions and repertoires. The evaluation of male facial beauty, on the other hand, appears to be shaped by more nationally specific racial and gender norms and ideologies.

Justifying Aesthetic Labor

Based on ethnographic and interview data collected in the modeling industries of Amsterdam, Paris, and Warsaw, this article shows that the relation between work, body, and self is particularly fraught for fashion models, as they work in a “greedy” industry that demands intensive forms of aesthetic labor. Such aesthetic labor requires models to continuously reinvent and negotiate their selves in different contexts. Fashion models make great effort to justify and maintain a coherent self, through enacting different forms of “good modelhood”—natural, healthy, and pragmatic modelhood, which are interpreted as modes of justification. These forms of modelhood all relate differently to the dominant aesthetic logic of fashion modeling and, consequently, bear different degrees of legitimacy within the field. By focusing on fashion models’ subjective experiences of aesthetic labor in relation to their selves, this article contributes to existing sociological perspectives on the body, showing how the body connects to morality and selfhood in European cultural and institutional contexts.

Creative Industries, Showbiz, and Sexualized Young Women: The Hong Kong Book Fair

This article investigates the annual Hong Kong Book Fair, where lang mo—sexy girls who would not qualify for conventional fashion modeling but appear almost ubiquitously in the city—and their sexy photo albums, calendars, cushions in their body shapes, and high-profile presence, have been causing public debates and moral panic. Drawing on material published during the media battle that started in 2009 and culminated the year after, I argue that the lang mo and the controversy surrounding their presence transformed the real place of the Book Fair into a heterotopic space where other sites were juxtaposed, where utopian ideals were constituted and contested, where young women and men were celebrating their moments of freedom and conjuring regimes of control.

The Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Cold War Context: Finnish Fashion Models and National Fantasies of International Success

This article explores fashion modeling as an area of interest to the national media. While much research has been done on modeling within fashion theory, my focus is on the role of models in national self-definition, and on the national fantasies and ideals of “making it” internationally that were attached to young women working abroad as models in the 1960s. I address these ideals in the historical context of the postwar modernization process and the geopolitical position of Finland as a neutral territory between the East and the West during the Cold War period. This article extends the existing theorizations on modeling by investigating the notion of cosmopolitanism as a structure of feeling.The research material consists of a collection of interviews published in the Finnish women's magazine Anna between 1963 and 1973.