Abstract
Fur garment has long been the conventional symbol for luxury, or conspicuous consumption. However, as fashion items began to diversify as part of overall fashion trend, fur items are now more about individual taste and style than just lavishness. Synthetic fur is especially emerging as a new promising fashion material, with a touch almost like natural fur at an affordable price. Along with the emergence of 'Vegan Fashion' trend, synthetic fur is establishing itself as a popular fashion textile. This study is an attempt to investigate subjective evaluation and physical properties of natural and synthetic furs, whose results will further serve as basic data in developing synthetic fur materials. Sensory and emotional evaluations are carried out on natural and artificial furs. For analysis, factors such as weight, thickness, air permeability, gloss and compressibility were surveyed to observe how they influence the physical properties. According to the subjective evaluation, natural and artificial fur samples do not differ in conspicuous ways in appearance. Experiments on physical properties, specifically warm/cool touch experiment, show that natural fur has a slightly higher warm sensation than artificial fur. Luster analysis by using a microscope revealed that there are subtle qualitative differences between natural and artificial fur. During the subjective evaluation, subjects found it hard to state distinct quantitative differences in luster. A survey as a means of assessing qualitative differences in gloss seems to be necessary to complement the evaluation. Results from this study will potentially serve as resources for diversification of fashion product designs using synthetic fur.
