If you are a woman and you browse for activewear online, do you feel threatened by the svelte, lithe bodies that strut the wears? Yes, say two studies by the Edith Cowan University (ECU) that claims that women shopping online for athleisure feel threatened by the body-focussed imagery used by the website.
- The sales of athleisure, a hybrid style of athletic clothing typically worn as everyday wear, have risen rapidly following the onset of COVID-19 and are expected to be worth more than $548 billion globally by 2024.
THE STUDIES: Led by ECU psychology researcher Dr Ross Hollett, the new studies are the first to use an eye-tracking experiment to explore online clothing shopping for activewear and its psychological outcomes.
- The study 'Gaze behaviour, body image in women and online apparel shopping' was published in the International Journal of Consumer Studies and the study 'Experimental evidence that browsing for activewear lowers explicit body image attitudes and implicit self-esteem in women' was published in the journal Body Image.
LABORATORY SESSIONS: Almost 100% of women involved in the study had shopped online for clothes in their lifetime, and 80% had done so in the past month.
- They spent about 90–100 minutes per week browsing for clothes online, with activewear one of the most popular clothing categories—second only to casualwear.
- During laboratory sessions, women were randomly allocated to browse an activewear, casualwear or home decor website for 15–20 minutes.
- Their body image and self-esteem were then measured using a combination of self-report and reaction time measures.
- After the shopping activity, researchers used eye tracking technology to measure the women's eye gaze behaviour towards a new set of female images, to see if the websites they browsed led to changes in where they focused their attention.
- Both studies found women felt worse about their looks and experienced lower self-esteem after browsing an activewear website.
- In comparison, browsing for casual clothing or homewares did not lead to negative body image or lower self-esteem.
GAZE BEHAVIOUR: Activewear retailers use body-focused marketing to promote their products, which tend to be tight, form-fitting or revealing. This type of imagery can be very threatening to women’s body image because it promotes an idealised and difficult to attain physique
- The first experiment found an interesting pattern of attention when researchers tracked women's eyes towards a new set of female images after the activewear shopping activity. Women who browsed for activewear showed much lower body gaze, meaning they preferred to gaze at faces, compared to women who browsed for casualwear.
- One potential reason for this finding is that women who browsed for activewear may have felt their body image was threatened by the body-focussed imagery used by the activewear website. When body image is threatened, women may be less likely to continue looking at other women’s bodies after browsing for activewear because they feel more uncomfortable.
WHAT THEY SAID:
Clothing retailers are under increasing pressure to operate in ethically responsible ways, such as reducing environmental impact or avoiding exploitative labour. However, minimising the negative impact of retail imagery on the psychological wellbeing of consumers was also their responsibility.
— Ross Hollett
Psychology Researcher
Edith Cowan University
