Touch in Text. The Communication of Tactility in Fashion E-Commerce Garment Descriptions
Additional information
Authors
Ornati M.
Type
Article in conference proceedings
Year
2021
Language
English
Abstract
Touch is central to the embodied experience of material garments. Passive touch sensations convey how dress feels on the skin, and active touch ena-bles the perception and appreciation of its material properties, as the term “fabric hand” aptly implies. In fact, the subjectively perceived tactile at-tributes of materials have been described and categorized into ad-hoc lexi-cons by means of sensory evaluation research procedures involving both expert and non-expert panellists. These vocabularies provide a semantic framework for the description of garment materials from a consumer per-spective. Thus, they can also serve as an interpretative lens for how tactility is communicated to online viewers. However, a pragmatic, qualitative in-vestigation into a representative sample of popular fashion e-commerce websites indicates that references to touch within garment page descrip-tions are sparse. Given e-commerce’s relevance for fashion brands, improv-ing communication of touch in text presents opportunities.
Conference proceedings
Fashion Communication Proceedings of the FACTUM 21 Conference, Pamplona, Spain, 2021
Month
September
Publisher
Springer
Start page number
29
End page number
40
Meeting name
FACTUM 2021
Meeting place
Pamplona, Spain
Meeting date
28 June - 1 July, 2021
ISBN
9783030813208
Editor
Kalbaska, N., Sádaba, T., Cominelli, F., Cantoni, L., & Torregrossa, M. (Eds.)
Keywords
touch, haptics, digital fashion communication, fashion e-commerce