Men’s and women’s implicit negativity towards obese fashion models

Ulf Aagerup

Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 2022, vol. 13, issue 3, 273-288

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to investigate whether women’s relatively positive response to obese models is the result of social desirability bias on the part of women rather than deep seated attitudes. 60 university students in Sweden underwent an Implicit Associations Test (IAT) to reveal attitudes towards obese models that the participants were not able or willing to openly express. The study shows that even though women express significantly more positive attitudes towards obese models than men do, women and men display similar implicit negativity towards obese models. The study replicates a previously shown explicit gender effect, but also extends theory on gender preferences towards models of different sizes and body types by introducing measurements of implicit attitudes. Finally, the paper provides a possible explanation for why the fashion industry largely refrains from using obese models even though women express relatively positive attitudes towards them.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20932685.2021.1977164 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rgfmxx:v:13:y:2022:i:3:p:273-288

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rgfm20

DOI: 10.1080/20932685.2021.1977164

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Global Fashion Marketing is currently edited by Yelena Wang

More articles in Journal of Global Fashion Marketing from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().