UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper is a review of the literature of gender stereotypes. It examines thedeconstruction of gender stereotypes through clothing in settings such as academia and the workplace, magazine and pop culture, and shopping behavior and consumerism. It is found that attire has a profound influence on traditional gender norms in the workplace, and shown that men use clothing to signal their sexuality and their social status. Gender portrayals within children’sand men’s magazines often form stereotypes, which can be damaging to one’s development of identity - pop culture does the same when contributing to societal gender norms. This paper investigates how internalized homophobia can affect the shopping behavior of gay men, and reviews how young people’s clothing choices are closely linked to self-expression in determiningpersonality and congeniality. Fashion psychology plays a role in everyone’s life and has the same impact as other branches such as social, abnormal, or child psychology may have.