The influence of striped clothing on visual body perception: A study on pattern spacing design

The slimming effect of striped clothing has long been a research topic in the field of visual perception. Some studies have supported the Helmholtz illusion, which suggests that clothing with horizontal lines makes a person appear thinner than clothing with vertical lines. However, other studies argued that these experiments lacked ecological validity, as it seemed unlikely that stimuli with vertical and horizontal stripes were present concurrently. Therefore, perceptual anchoring should be incorporated into the experimental procedure. While previous studies used only pencil stripes as the research object, this study employed both pencil and equidistant stripes, introducing five different stripe spacing types. This study conducted three comparisons regarding the perception of body image in striped clothing using a survey (n = 214): Experiment 1 identified the horizontal style that appears the slimmest; Experiment 2 identified the vertical style that appears the slimmest; Experiment 3 compared the effects of horizontal and vertical stripes across five garment styles on body image perception, including which style makes the body look slimmer, enhances the figure more effectively, and is more visually appealing. The results show that the horizontally pencil-striped dress (1 × 2 h in our nomenclature) is perceived as the slimmest. Second, while a pencil stripe pattern may make the body appear slimmer when oriented horizontally, an equidistant stripe pattern may do this when oriented vertically instead (1 × 1 v from back). Third, there are slight differences between the perceptions of males and females.