Objective Chinese opera costumes play a vital role in the opera performance. To ensure the social preservation of traditional opera culture, it requires understanding how young audiences perceive and evaluate costumes emotionally and semantically. However, limited research has been done on the quantitative relationship among costume design elements, aesthetic emotions, and semantic evaluations. Therefore, using Leder's aesthetic cognitive processing model and the emotional Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) model, this study investigated how emotions are involved in the semantic evaluations of clothing. The Xiaosheng pleated garment of Yue Opera served as the specific research object.
Method Using two types of materials, pure polyester and pure silk, with 15 colors (top five colors, bottom five colors, middle five colors) and 4 patterns (no pattern, flower decorated border, flower broken in branch, flower medallion) for combination design, 120 pictures were built by CLO3D 6.0. Through corpus search, group classification, and expert consultation, we screened five groups of semantic differential pairs used to describe the Xiaosheng pleated garments: low level-high level, refined-rough, fresh-gaudy, brave-gentle, and stiff-drape. University students were invited to randomly score all the samples on the liking, PAD emotions, and semantic evaluations on PsychoPy 2022.2.4, and data from 35 validated subjects was analyzed via SPSS 25 and Amos 26.
Results The relevance of pleated garment design elements, emotions, and semantic evaluations was first examined. The results showed that only the material had a significant correlation with the semantic "stiff-drape". The color was strongly correlated with liking, pleasure, dominance, arousal, "low level-high level", and "refined-rough". The pattern was also significantly correlated with the last three. Moreover, pleasure had a significant correlation with all semantics except for "fresh-gaudy", while arousal was significantly correlated with "fresh-gaudy" and "brave-gentle". Finally, dominance had a significant correlation with all semantics. We further leveraged one-way ANOVA to test the effects of design elements on emotions and semantics, respectively. Material did not affect emotions, and showed significance only in semantics "stiff-drape". The arousal of flower medallion was significantly higher than that of no pattern, and those with flower medallion were voted to be more high-class. Color had a significant effect on all emotions and semantics. According to the emotional impact, the color of Xiaosheng pleated clothes can be clustered into 3 categories: the first category is high pleasure, low arousal, high dominance colors, containing Aiqing, white, light pink, light blue, and black. The second category is high pleasure, high arousal, low dominance colors, containing bright red, goose yellow, pink, and bright yellow. The third category is low pleasure, low arousal, low dominance colors, containing treasure blue, lake, old green, medium green, and purple. Finally, the study constructed the mediating model of emotions on partial design elements and semantic evaluations. The analysis shows that arousal and dominance played a mediating role in clustered color type, pattern and "low level - high level". Pleasure, arousal, and dominance mediated the "refined-rough" in the clustered color and pattern. In the clustered color and semantic judgment of "fresh-gaudy", PAD played the mediation roles. "Brave-gentle" evaluation was mediated by the pleasure and arousal of the color. In addition, the dominance of color positively predicted the semantics "stiff-drape".
Conclusion The combinations of materials, colors and patterns of pleated garments have effects on both aesthetic judgments and aesthetic emotions. Pleated garments with the feeling of high-level, refined, drape, fresh, and gentle were more likely to be preferred by the youngsters, and the design of patterns was significantly associated with the semantics "low level-high level", "refined-rough", and emotional arousal. The study also found that color can significantly affect aesthetic emotions. Based on the PAD emotion model, the traditional opera costume color scheme was reclassified into three major categories: high pleasure, high arousal, and low dominance; high pleasure, low arousal, and high dominance; and low pleasure, low arousal, and low dominance. It was also explored that emotions played an important mediating role in the pleated garment design elements and semantic evaluations. Therefore, this study provides an empirical reference for the aesthetic process of opera costumes and their innovative design.
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