Red Dress Research Articles

Novelty seeking as driving factor for fashion apparel innovators: A qualitative investigation

ABSTRACTThe objective of the paper is to comprehend the parsimoniously explored phenomenon of novelty seeking in the fashion apparel consumption through the lived experiences of fashion apparel innovators in the context of adult career women of emerging market. Interpretive phenomenological analysis is used to explicate consumers’ everyday lived experiences of fashion apparel consumption. Based on the interpretation of the findings of the qualitative data, we endeavored to conceptualize novelty seeking as a multidimensional second-order construct comprising of four main dimensions of themes with three subdimensions viz. sensory appeal (Fairy tale experience, Stress anecdote, Self-confidence booster), finding the niche (Idiosyncratic attire, Self-expressing through clothing, Red carpet dress), clothes-aholic (Hoarding of the clothes, Ever lacking wardrobe, Impulse clothes purchase), and socially bound (Varied persona, First impression, Balancing effect). The conceptualization encapsulates how novelty seeking is driving innovative behavior in fashion apparel context. Novelty seeking is an interdisciplinary concept. Apart from psychology domain, several studies have been conducted across various industries in the consumer behavior domain, especially in tourism, hi-tech products, and telecom. However, in-depth research on novelty seeking in fashion industry is limited. Value of this article lies in developing a theoretical base of novelty seeking in fashion industry through lived experiences of consumers in emerging market.

Manifold Northeast Life & Trust

Manifold Northeast Life & Trust Cat Powell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo of cubicles by Tim Patterson; forest by Nicholas A. Tonelli [End Page 26] I wake early and water the plants. I have a lot of plants, and it takes the better part of an hour to see to them. Most are rescues that I find abandoned [End Page 27] on suburban sidewalks, put out with the trash because they’re ugly or dying or refusing to flower. My oldest is a Ficus benjamina I’ve had for forty-five years, retrieved from the garbage room of my freshman dorm with only three dark and glossy leaves to his name. Like me, he’s thickened with age, and unlike me, he’s grown so that his crown now brushes the dining room ceiling. I mist the broad-leafed bird-of-paradise that’s only ever flowered once; the purple-pink Hawaiian ti plant; the arrowhead syngonium; the forest of pink and white fittonia, which everyone gave as gifts the year my wife died. I soak the orchids, the flaming sword bromeliad, the tillandsia my daughter left behind when she moved out to LA. Then I get the watering can and attend to the geraniums my wife planted, now grown to Little Shop of Horrors proportions; the massive jade tree my mother left me; the spiked snake plants, the hanging vines, the calving spider plant, the gold-and-green-draped corn plant, the ZZ plants with their dark, plasticky leaves. I make a pot of coffee. I make a tuna fish sandwich. I make a piece of toast with butter and strawberry jam. I put the sandwich and a travel mug of coffee into the satchel full of papers I cart back and forth from work each day, though I’ve never once taken out the papers at home. The walk to the bus is cold and drab, gloom crowding the corners of the late April day. Heaps of dirty snow still line the street. I’m alone at the bus stop—too early for the students, too late for the downtown workers whose shifts started hours ago. No one else takes the bus if they can help it. But I hate driving. No matter the hour of the day, everyone looks tired on the bus, and this morning is no different, the few occupants all grim and ground-down in the fluorescent light. I take a seat and watch the dark teeth of the roofs and the lit windows of the old houses rushing past. In one, a woman in a red dress with yellow flowers stands over a stove. I imagine a quick spiral of golden oil, the snap of the gas burner, the crisp tap and slime of an egg. Maybe she has a young son, and she shouts for him to get up, but he just pulls the comforter over his head and hides in the warmth. She goes to get him, pulls back the blankets half teasing, half exasperated; she leans over to give him a kiss, the loose V-neck slipping to reveal the line of sun-worn skin between her full breasts. My wife would have looked good in a dress like that. And now we’re nearing my stop. I put these things away. [End Page 28] I used to have an office with a window back when I was a manager and there were still people to manage. Now I sit alone in a cubicle at the windowless center of the empty seventh floor. No one else ever comes to the office. The other survivors prefer to work from home, and all of us work harder than dogs, the functions of a team of forty devolved to the aging shoulders of the five of us and our tyrannical machines always pinging and dinging and pressing for our attention at every moment of the day. In two years, the lease on the building is up, and a large multinational conglomerate will conclude its long, slow digesting of what was once Manifold Northeast Mutual Life & Trust. What few jobs are left will disappear down to corporate headquarters, and we’ll...

A Semiotic Reading of the East Asian-Canadian Restaging of the Immigrant Experience and Redress in Marty Chan’s The Forbidden Phoenix and David Yees’s lady in the red dress

A Semiotic Reading of the East Asian-Canadian Restaging of the Immigrant Experience and Redress in Marty Chan’s The Forbidden Phoenix and David Yees’s lady in the red dress

The Road to Llorona Park by Christopher Carmona

Reviewed by: The Road to Llorona Park by Christopher Carmona David Langston (bio) The Road to Llorona Park By Christopher Carmona Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2016. 148 pp. ISBN: 978-1-62288-117-8 With the thoughtful short-story collection, The Road to Llorona Park, Christopher Carmona has contributed his own chapter to the traditional "defenses of literature," which justifies fiction for presenting models of principled (or unprincipled) conduct that offer ethical guidance: as Kenneth Burke puts it, literature proffers equipment for living. In a set of vivid episodes and character studies, Carmona makes a notable addendum to this tradition. For him stories are independent forces famished for lodgment in the mind and in the physical action of a vigilant, careful, and caring intelligence. This central theme structures the opening tale, "What the Story Eats," in which three street children, brothers Ramses and Moises, and a girl, Tzipora, meet La Anciana, who—in classic fairy-tale mode—dwells by a river beneath a bridge and hungers for "living stories" that will sustain her. Carmona associates this aged crone with the fairy-tale figure "La Llorona," the weeping woman of Mexican folklore who drowns children, except Carmona adds a crucial humanizing caveat: La Anciana is "more Indian" (11). The children's names suggest we have entered the zone of fable as they echo Cecil B. DeMille's fanciful telling of the Moses story in his 1956 film, The Ten Commandments, in which Moses, married to Zipporah, resists the tyranny of his brother, the Pharoah Ramses. Carmona's ironic film analogy brings symbolic density to the brothers' early-pubescent rivalry over Tzipora, but also suggests a more serious theme: the life-giving stories sought by La Anciana have a larger mythopoeic potential to shape entire cultures. This is suggested in the way she communicates with Moises and Tziporah in a language that remains incomprehensible to Ramses and an outside observer, a news reporter. The journalist has been dispatched to write a human interest story that he sneeringly regards as ephemeral rubbish about street urchins surviving by selling chewing gum (eating without nutrition). The children and the old woman know better, however; their world demands fresh stories that will rejuvenate its inhabitants. In Carmona's cardinal metaphor, even the stories by an obtuse journalist may devour readers in a moment of shared consumption to assuage their common hunger. Throughout the book, Carmona associates female figures with the stories. Like the old woman under the bridge, these women hover at boundaries that give them an ambiguous existence. They readily cross and re-cross boundaries of life and death, of male and female gender, of national location, and of language. Every boundary crossing provokes a need for appropriate linguistic performance (a story, a poem, a legal brief, a comforting conversation) that will breathe fresh life into the reality of their perpetual exile. When forging those connections succeeds, the resulting mutual understanding and communication allays the disquiet of estrangement and loss. Carmona extends his association of La Llorona beyond La Anciana to all of these shape-shifting female figures. But Carmona's own narratives aim to reshape the tragic implications of the Llorona myth by developing some striking and very smart variations of the archetype. Parallel to Chicanx feminists who have transvalued the negative traditional images of women to ascribe virtue and strength to figures formerly ridiculed or denigrated, Carmona aims for understanding that the triumph, irony, endurance, and erotic passion of his characters are key elements in their continual metamorphosis and reinvention. Carmona's incarnations of Llorona annul her reputation as the feared "stealer of children" and mutate into various guises that promise to transcend the tragic dead end of the original folktale. For example, in one of the more arresting tales, "The Sublime Dress," a beautiful female outcast composes a story about a red dress hanging on her lover's wall, a story that transfigures the clothing (another costume, a form waiting to give shape and grace to a body) into a vibrant representation of the two lovers' yearnings and dreams. In the eponymous story at the book's center, Carmona further elaborates the Llorona...

Black Wax(ing): On Gil Scott-Heron and the Walking Interlude

Black Wax(ing): On Gil Scott-Heron and the Walking Interlude

Beyond Invisibility: A REDress Collaboration to Raise Awareness of the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women

This article describes the impact of a case study of the REDress project on a university campus in Nova Scotia, Canada. The REDress project is a grassroots initiative that operates at the local level to empower Aboriginal women through an evocative art exhibit: the hanging of empty red dresses symbolizing missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and the emptiness of the societal response to the violence committed against them. Using a participatory-action research model (PAR), which guides the exploration of the kinds of ideas instilled within this community-based initiative, my research demonstrates the potential this project has to mobilize local Indigenous women’s perspectives and voices, in order to break the silence to which they are often subjected through structures of oppression. This process relies on the establishment of meaningful connections with members of the StFX Aboriginal Student’s Society and creating a transparent research process, while also encouraging action in the form of awareness building. The project makes a political statement that resists the ascribed invisibility of Aboriginal women by honouring the lives of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. As a community-based initiative, the REDress project demonstrates the beginnings of reconciliation by cultivating meaningful relationships that provide hope for the future.

진 리스의 『광막한 싸가소 바다』에 나타난 색채와 향취의 정치학

The images of color and fragrance appear very intensely throughout Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Color and fragrance remind Antoinette of the specific visual and olfactory stimuli she experienced in her homeland in the past and play a role in reviving the memory rooted deep in the homeland, which have close relations with her identity. In this context, this study would focus on color and fragrance, which are the basis on which Antoinette understands the world. Color and fragrance appear through natural objects in Antoinette’ homeland throughout the novel, and especially, the colorful red dress is an important mechanism that constructs her identity. Jean Rhys expresses Antoinette’s identity, especially, through the subject matters of color and fragrance to emphasize that her identity has a character that cannot easily be scooped up with a net of reason and rationality and criticize a man of empire, who would define that as uniform and compulsory or deprive her of that. To analysis this, this study would investigate the inter-textuality between Wide Sargasso Sea and Jean Rhys’s previous works.

The effect of schizotypy on the relationship between women's red clothing and perceived sexual interest

ObjectiveRed may increase perceptions of sexual intent and the sexual attractiveness of women. As such, red is purported to serve a function in sexual attraction, although findings have been mixed. Individual differences in observers can affect the perception of sexual intent. One of these individual differences (i.e., sub‐clinical schizotypy) has not been investigated in relation to the perceived sexual intent of women wearing red, hence this was addressed.MethodThis study involved 72 men and 144 women, recruited to complete an online survey. Participants completed a schizotypy symptom scale, and rated women wearing red and green dresses on sexual desire, sexual receptivity, and sexual attractiveness.ResultsIn line with the hypothesis, increases in schizotypy scores were associated with increased perception of sexual interest (summed ratings of sexual desire and sexual receptivity) for the model wearing the red dress more so than the green dress. However, no main effect of colour was observed.ConclusionsIndividuals high in schizotypy showed an exaggerated perception of sexual interest for women wearing red, implying that intentionality biases in schizotypy could be extended to the perception of sexual intent. The effect of colour on sexual intent perception may be dependent on measurement of individual variation.

Redressing the Red Dress: Rethinking the Campaign.

Since 2002, female cardiovascular mortality has significantly decreased. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder Search Database, 491 713 American women died of cardiovascular disease in 2002 compared with 399 028 in 2014. This improvement has been attributed in part to the joint efforts of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the Heart Truth campaign, the American Heart Association and the Go Red for Women Campaign, WomenHeart, the campaign of the National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease, and the Women’s Heart Alliance, along with many partners, who joined efforts to increase the awareness of heart disease in women. As with all epidemiological findings, it is a challenge to tease out which factors have led to the improvements in cardiovascular outcomes in women. Understanding what worked and what did not will guide the development and implementation of future campaigns aimed at further reducing cardiovascular mortality. Data from surveys suggest that awareness about heart disease has significantly increased, with larger increases in whites than in Latinos and blacks.1 Women are more likely to be aware that heart disease is the number 1 killer of women, yet percentages remain suboptimal (≈55%). Although the Go Red and Red Dress campaigns targeted women between 40 and 60 years of age, increased awareness in healthcare providers due to the …

PRETTY THINGS (EXCERPT)

1 2 9 R P R E T T Y T H I N G S ( E X C E R P T ) V I R G I N I E D E S P E N T E S Translated by Emma Ramadan Pauline is sitting at the kitchen table. She’d opened the shoe closet, nothing flat. At twenty-five years old, she has never thought to put on high heels, and she finds herself grotesque in a red dress, like she’s in drag, trying to walk in the living room with the lowest heels in the entire collection. Absurd attempt at a dignified walk that’s even remotely passable. Ankle, in jeopardy, jerks to the side, knee knocks against the other knee. So she has to walk carefully, think: Which do I put down first, the sole or the heel? Think: Where do I put the weight of my body so that I don’t slouch? Hold myself upright, move the leg. But it doesn’t work; she looks like a drunk crab, nothing like a woman. She looks at her feet, destroyed. Her heel is red from the abuse. Her toes are stunted, sensation of ground-up bones, because the toe of the shoe contracts and compresses with no regard to the form of a foot. It will never work. Her rage turns black. Claudine, poor idiot, where did you get the idea of wearing such things, who were you trying to make happy, to look like what, stupid pathetic slut? 1 3 0 D E S P E N T E S Y The telephone is ringing o√ the hook, ten times worse than yesterday. ‘‘Claudie? Claudie pick up I know you’re there, I called five minutes ago and the line was busy. Come on, my dear, scamper over and pick up. Claudie, I have good news for you, come pick up . . . You’re not there? Listen, I don’t get it, call me back, it’s Pierre.’’ She takes o√ the impossible shoes, immediate relief. In less than an hour she’s gotten herself some magnificent blisters, transparent skin bubbling up from the rest. Takes a bath, a little later. The vials, the bottles, the tubes, she puts everything in the bathwater, childhood memory of playing games with the toys floating around. Eye pads, lotion, soft foaming cleanser, pulverizing exfoliator, mask of fruit acids and vitamin C or ceramide, things of every color, creams for nourishing this or that, silky skin, shiny hair, radiant complexion – relentless battle against yourself; whatever you do, don’t be what you are. Getting out of the water, she sni√s her arms, a mess of scents, all the things she had tried, an irritating odor, annoying because it’s meant to be calming. Like how when we really badly want to fall asleep, fearing insomnia, we end up tossing and turning in the sheets fifty times, in a rage. A frenzy of serenity. Red dress, her whole chest exposed, like a cow showing o√ her udders; the top of her ass, which no one should see, is visible. She spins around suspiciously in front of the mirror. A pang in her heart – she already doesn’t look like herself. Leafed through the pile of magazines that Claudine had been reading. Sheer panic. In a tone of amused complicity, a cornucopia of little tips for being a trendy slut. And getting into every single detail, making sure everything is in its right place: how you should orgasm and how you should break up and how you should shave and how you should dye your hair down to your pussy and how you should be, inside and out. A deceptively charming tone, idiotic propaganda dictating what we should be. After centuries of having to completely cover themselves, women are now commanded to bare everything, to prove that everything about them conforms to society’s expectations, to show they have recalibrated themselves: look at my endless legs, clean-shaven P R E T T Y T H I N G S 1 3 1 R and tanned; my ass with just the right amount of muscle; my...

Sensing Through Slowness: Korean Americans and the Un/making of the Home Film Archive

Sensing Through Slowness:Korean Americans and the Un/making of the Home Film Archive Crystal Mun-hye Baik (bio) Introduction In the opening scene, two women appear before the camera. Adorned in a bright red dress, the younger of the two grabs the hand of the older woman as they shyly walk toward the filmmaker. Joined by two lanky young men and a young girl dressed in a simple black frock, everyone laughs as they enjoy popsicles. Within twenty seconds, the frame jumps to a different sequence of scenes. In the unfolding imagery, an older woman and adolescent girl pluck pink roses from a front lawn as they greet a young man in front of the house. Gesturing to the camera, the older woman teases the young man as she playfully pushes him off the porch. Captured on 8-mm color film shot during the early 1950s, this silent footage was taken by Shungnak "Luke" Kim, an evangelical missionary and the reverend of the Korean Presbyterian Church, one of the most important institutions in Los Angeles's Korean community during the first half of the twentieth century.1 Portraying Reverend Kim's family and friends enjoying a warm evening together, this scene is a snippet from the reverend's collection of home films deposited into the University of Southern California (USC) Korean Heritage Library.2 An assemblage that includes color and black-and-white films shot over two decades (1948–67), the reverend's films register a tumultuous arc of time encompassing the afterlife of Japanese colonial rule, the Cold War division [End Page 5] of Korea, and the beginning of dictatorial rule in South Korea. As one of the only known home film collections to depict Koreans in the United States before 1965, a pivotal year marking key shifts in U.S. immigration policies and significant changes in home film technology, Reverend Kim's footage offers a compelling opportunity to contemplate the materialization of an early Korean presence in the United States. Located at the fault lines of Japanese occupation, U.S. racial violence, and competing Cold War ideologies, Koreans were subjected to Japanese colonial violence and racial exclusion in the United States, even as they became enmeshed in the consolidation of American imperial power in Asia. In this article, I draw upon the reverend's home film archive to track these historical conditions and the conflicting memories associated with the multiple positions occupied by Korean Americans during this volatile moment. Specifically, through a methodological approach conceptualized as a differentiated analysis, Reverend Kim's films generate meaningful opportunities to sense and make sense of messy subjectivities that exceed oppositional binaries, such as the national versus transnational, colonized versus colonizer, and oppressor versus oppressed. This textured reading of Reverend Kim's film archive, I argue, pushes against the existing parameters of Asian American film and media studies by contending with the ways in which the home film is predominantly depicted as a cultural apparatus that reproduces dominant ideals and norms or as a cultural artifact that taps into the truthful or raw realities of subaltern subjects. In fleshing out a differentiated approach to the home film, Edward Said's contrapuntal reading practice is an illuminating starting point. For Said, a contrapuntal framework recognizes the complexity of imperialism by attending to the entwined histories of metropolitan and subaltern life that constitute the cultural field. In essence, a contrapuntal practice feels for difference, incongruities, and absence, because imperialism produces historical conditions and subjectivities that are conflicting, contrarian, and at times, ugly. Such ugliness unhinges the dichotomies of colonizer versus colonized, evil versus good, and dominance versus resistance, particularly as everyday life transcends these hard-and-fast delineations. Hence, by identifying the political, historical, and racial conditions that anchor a cultural work, a differentiated reading labors through a condensation of irreconcilable gaps, submerged experiences, and silenced desires informing the "hybrid, heterogeneous … and unmonolithic" experiences of colonized subjects.3 Yet if a contrapuntal reading underscores the hybridity of cultural content produced at a particular moment, a differentiated reading accentuates this sense of multiplicity by attending to the specificity of the home film medium—and the technological practices, expectations, and yearnings that govern its aesthetic...

Dressing Symkyn's Wife: Chaucer's Reeve's Tale and Bad Taste

Abstract Chaucer's Reeve describes the entrance of the miller Symkyn and his wife into church on a holy day as a “sighte.” Why is Symkyn's wife in a red dress, and why does the Reeve consider it a spectacle? To answer these questions, this article examines Chaucer's use of the term sighte in the Canterbury Tales, the nature of fashion codes during the later Middle Ages, and what the choice of wearing a red dress says about an individual in a late medieval English village. Using Pierre Bourdieu's notion of distinction or taste, this article shows that the Reeve's description of Symkyn's wife in a red dress is one of the earliest renditions of tastelessness in English-language literature.

Go Red for Women Strategically Focused Research Network Centers.

Twenty years ago, the American Heart Association (AHA) pioneered a national initiative to raise awareness of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in women. In 1997, only 1 in 3 women recognized heart disease as their leading killer, and the percentage doubled within a decade.1 In 2004, the AHA adopted the Red Dress symbol to represent the cause and, in conjunction with the release of the first evidence-based guidelines for the prevention of heart disease in women, launched the Go Red for Women campaign. The Go Red for Women Strategically Focused Research Network represents another major milestone in the women and heart disease movement. Funded centers are listed in the Figure. Each center has synergistic population, clinical, and basic projects with a shared scientific theme. All centers train fellows and collaborate with each other in the Go Red for Women Strategically Focused Research Network to advance the mission and impact of the AHA. A recent AHA scientific statement highlighted the lack of sleep as an important contributor to obesity, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and CVD.2 Women may be at particular risk of abnormal sleep and its consequences because of unique life stages and circumstances, such as caregiving responsibilities and hormonal changes. Despite the importance of sleep as a lifestyle risk factor, …

Access Nollywood

Access Nollywood

The Problem of Suicide and Double Suicide in Contemporary Japanese Literature

This paper explores the problem of suicide and double suicide in contemporary Japanese literature. Characters from fourteen stories are under consideration, with respect to categories such as shame, guilt, and retribution. Based on stories of six popular Japanese writers (Hoshi Shinichi’s “The Overtaking”, Atōda Takashi’s “The Hair”, “The Ghost of the Office”, “The Red Dress”, “The Visitor” and “The God of Happiness”, Akagawa Jirō’s “The Double Suicide”, “Let’s Shock”, “The Dancing Man”, “The Gossip” and “The New Worker”, Miyabe Miyuki’s “Don’t Say Anything”, Otsuichi’s “Ishinome”, and Isaka Kōtarō’s “Grasshopper”) I analyse characteristic features of these “suicide” stories in the Japanese literature of the last four decades. Refs 23.

팀 버튼 감독의 판타지 영화 『이상한 나라의 앨리스』의 스토리 전개구조에 따른 의상색채 연구

This study investigated the colors of the costumes and backgrounds of characters in the fantasy film, Alice in Wonderland(2010) by Tim Burton. The methods used were literature studies including related books, articles and internet materials, and positive research with DVD color analysis. Twenty-one scenes were selected by the researcher. Five scenes were selected from novel and film components representing, exposition, complication, crisis, climax, and denouement. After controlled pixel by photoshop program and the represented colors, hues and tones were analyzed. The results were as follows; First, in four characters, Alice's dress colors changed depend on the situation and the passage offered from blue to red, metal light, and blue green. The Mad Hatter's colors were orange with green which signified madness and passion. The Red Queen's red dress and blue make up represented countrified and evil. The White Queen's all white dress and hair, black eyes and vivid red meant purity and nobility. Similar characters' colors were limited. Second, the background colors, especially tones were an important component of the fantasy image. These were different for each type of scene in the film such as exposition, complication, crisis, climax, and denouement.

Hard Truths About the Red Dress: A Discourse Analysis of the Heart Truth Campaign in Canada

Hard Truths About the Red Dress: A Discourse Analysis of the Heart Truth Campaign in Canada

Pink Ribbons and Red Dresses: A Mixed Methods Content Analysis of Media Coverage of Breast Cancer and Heart Disease

ABSTRACTThis research examined media coverage of breast cancer (n = 145) and heart disease and stroke (n = 39) news articles, videos, advertisements, and images in a local Canadian context through quantitative and thematic content analyses. Quantitative analysis revealed significant differences between coverage of the diseases in placement, survivors as a source of information, health agency, human interest stories, citation of a research study, the inclusion of risk statistics, discussion of preventative behaviors, and tone used. The thematic analysis revealed themes that characterized a “typical” breast cancer survivor and indicated that “good” citizens and businesses should help the cause of breast cancer. Themes for heart disease and stroke articulated individual responsibility and the ways fundraising reinforced femininity and privilege. Findings provide insight on how these diseases are framed in local Canadian media, which might impact an individual’s understanding of the disease.

A True Crime Tale: Re-imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines

A True Crime Tale: Re-imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines

‘Kant and the Little Red Dress’ from Kant et la petite robe rouge by Lamia Berrada-Berca. Translated from the French by Suzy Ceulan Hughes

‘Kant and the Little Red Dress’ from <i>Kant et la petite robe rouge</i> by Lamia Berrada-Berca. Translated from the French by Suzy Ceulan Hughes