Walking Your Runway: How Personality Affects Self-Expression through the Medium of Clothing

Abstract

The medium of clothing has the power to be a tool for individuals’ self-expression, according to previous research. This project designed a new scale for assessing the degree and nature of peoples’ involvement with clothing and assessed the potential impact of personality type on that involvement using the Big Five Scale of personality types measuring Neuroticism, Extroversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. No significant effect of personality type appeared in a sample of 181 participants’ ratings on several measures of their immersion in clothing. Both gender and family income level did impact the ratings raising the question of to whom the fascination with clothes belongs.