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Introduction
As of 2018, the average American woman was a size 16. (Wessels 1) This might be
surprising to many readers, as most clothing stores only carry sizes up to 12 or 14, and most
advertisements feature a woman between size 00 and 6. (Williams 5) This gap between reality
and the representation of women in the fashion industry no doubt impacts the dynamic of our
society, and by looking at why this misrepresentation exists, how a lack of inclusion impacts
women, what these problems can lead to, and finally possible solutions the fashion industry
Research Questions
- Do you feel that most clothing stores have ads that feature models with your body type?
- On a scale of 1 to 10 how much does seeing a model with your body type impact your
shopping habits?
❏ Price
❏ Sizes available in store
❏ Atmosphere of store
❏ Employee Interactions
❏ Sales
❏ Advertisements
response than anticipated and those results were different than expected. Most answers to
multiple choice questions were close to being even, with a slight majority. So while there wasn’t
a huge gap between most answers, the answers that the majority chose surprised me. I learned
that I might be more alone in feeling misrepresented in retail than I originally thought.
As a whole, I did not receive as much information to support my argument as I had
predicted. Although I did obtain a decent amount of students that said finding clothing that fits is
difficult and advertisements don’t represent them well, the majority of students that filled out my
survey seemingly don’t have much issue with misrepresentation. This does impact my research
quite a bit because now I understand that when I am addressing my main audience I cannot really
rely on the female students understanding the feeling of being left out in the fashion industry. I
need to change my argument a bit to explain why it’s important to support brands that support
people of all kinds, not just brands that target your size and race.
Reflection
When reviewing my procedures, I would change a lot of things about how I went about
this project. To start, I would have immediately made a survey for OHS students, as opposed to
how I made a survey for retail employees and then ultimately changed my goal. I would also
have sent out my survey earlier in hopes of getting an even wider range of responses. My
responses were helpful, but not in the way I was hoping, and I wonder if more time would have
My survey was also sent out at a time that many other surveys were sent out, and if I had
more of a choice as to when I sent my survey out, I would have done it at a time when students
weren’t being overwhelmed with other surveys. From this project I have learned a lot about how
timing and circumstance can impact your results. I have also learned that although your results
might not be what can directly help your research, they can still give you important information