Fashion Design for Short Male Consumers

Abstract

This article focuses on short male consumers and fashion design. There are two reasons why we chose short men for this study. First, male consumers who are shorter than 5’8” have been ignored by most of the mainstream fashion brands (Brock, 2013). Second, “scholarly research has almost exclusively focused on women, leaving a critical gap in the research on men’s fit issues and preferences (Chattaraman et al. (2013, p. 291).” Qualitative and quantitative research methods were employed to understand how short men perceive, evaluate and select clothing from different perspectives. This research project consists of three phases, however, we only completed the first phase of our study at this stage. Therefore, this article only focuses on phase one, and the results of phase two and three will be presented in the future. In phase one, online posted comments were collected from two fashion blogs in order to understand short men’s shopping and consuming experiences. We believe that the results of this study will provide meaningful insights and useful information to fashion practitioners in general and menswear designers in particular.