The subject of our podcast is « psychology of fashion ». The guest of this podcast is a Cognitive psychologist Carolyn Mair, who created the psychology of fashion department at the London College of Fashion the University of the Arts London. She explains our fashion behaviors and why psychologists are needed to help solve some of the biggest challenges for the fashion industry. She is currently a consultant for fashion brands and the author of “The Psychology of Fashion” Her goal is to study the behaviour of buyers, what they want to buy how and why. The fashion industry has a poor reputation in terms of social responsibility and environment damages. Psychologist are important in the fashion industry because they can help consumers to change their habits and help employers to create better conditions for the staff. Today, the problme is the overproduction and the overconsumption because quite often people don’t wear what they bought. In fact people buy more than they needed and Majority of people want to consume a lot simply because it’s cheap. People can change their habits and have to change their habits and buy less and buy mindfull and something that we really want but don’t but multiple items that we’re not going to wear. 80% of clothes in our wardrobe are unworn. Buying too much is something that we really should avoid. Buy less is a win-win situation : you’ve got more money to enjoy experiences that bring more satisfaction and you’re doing less harm to the environment. Moreover the work conditions are really bad in some factories and abuse of the workers and with human right. So with have to buy mindfully. An other problem of fashion industry is the stress of a good appearance. Clothes conveys a lot about a person and it’s stressful if we don’t feel comfortable in what we’re wearing. So we don’t have the cognitive capacity to deal with the problme at hand. Resarche show thaht a very brief look at fashion imagery of thin models or airbrush models can damage a person’s body satisfaction. They feel worse about their body tant they did before after watch it. So it’s important to gave more diversity and representation of the populations. Passage : We have to change social codes because if people continue to watch thin models in magazine they will be always insatisfied and want more clothes or more product to try to look like models. But it’s an unreachable goal because it’s unreal. For example: for a long time, smoking were a mark of belonging to the high society. We saw cigarettes in media, and movies. The slogan was “Smoking makes people beautiful and intelligent”. Smoking became a positive and respectable image even if trapped thousand of people in a bad addiction. But recently, social codes have changes and thanks to public health campaigns smoking became negative, and the tobacco consumption decreased. These are the same mechanisms for the fashion industry, so it is necessary to understand consumers behaviours and change it. the subject was really interesting, we must make effort to reduce our impact on the planet. Every one need to understand that green growth doesn’t exist, there is nothing ecological about overconsuming. Human must learn to restrict himself in all areas of consumption. Propose another consumption can’t be an other possibility but we have only to reduce our consumption by any ways.
I Have learn some words : fashion industry = l’industrie de la mode
airbrush = aérographe