Between Fashion and Technology - Investigating Mobile Fashion Applications

The increasing diffusion of smartphones has made popular new services and functions such as geolocalization and, especially, applications (apps). There is in fact an extraordinary level of offering and adoption of mobile Internet applications, which help, support, and facilitate many aspects of domestic life. In the present paper we present explorative research focusing on mobile Internet applications in the field of fashion and on their main characteristics. Our starting point is the conviction that fashion applications deserve special consideration since they have the potential to play a very important role in the domestication and appropriation at mass level of an important social phenomenon such as fashion. In practice, we explore their role by triangulating three methods: a survey of the current fashion applications, qualitative analysis of the reviews posted in the 42 most popular applications, and a number of semi-structured interviews with their users. At the same time, we set up a sub-sample of 20 Chinese fashion apps from Google Play and 25 from iTunes to be compared with the 21 most popular English samples in the iTunes store and 23 in the Google Play store. Among these Chinese applications, some of them are Chinese versions of the most popular applications at international level and the rest represent the most popular fashion applications in China\u2019s iTunes app store. The main results of this case study enable us to have a sense of users\u2019 reception of apps and to understand the cultural differences between the English and Chinese mobile fashion applications