Toward an Operational Definition of Dress

Abstract

This research provided an empirically derived operational definition of dress which may be useful to scientists in the field of textiles and clothing. Viewing dress as a superordinate level category, basic and subordinate level categories of dress were sought using hierarchical cluster analytic techniques. In a controlled laboratory setting one hundred male and female subjects sorted 106 sketches of women's dress into piles based on the similarity of one form to all others in the stimulus set. The resulting structural arrangement of the stimuli was then studied and it was found that a taxonomic arrangement of dress emerged. Three basic groupings of dress emerged which were mutually exclusive and exhaustive : Special occasion, bifurcated, and skirted dress. Within each group subordinate subsets emerged; qualitative analyses of the features of these forms of dress as they relate to those in other groupings were presented. Analysis of the categories at the basic and subordinate levels suggests that subjects' cognitive process may have been based upon classification of contextual features as well as the structural features of dress. The distinctive features that distinguish the groupings of dress from one another may serve as a basis for an operational definition of dress for future research. Suggestions for future exploration of dimensions of dress, which can still further clarify the construct of dress were made.