Wearing Behavior of the Active Silver Generation to Functional Textiles Related with Gender and Age

Studying awareness, importance, satisfaction, and wearing behavior of functional textiles for active silver generation related with gender and age is expected to contribute to clothing products development to improve and maintain their health and marketing strategy fit for user characteristics. For empirical research, a survey was developed and the aged 50 and above were 332 respondents. The results of the study are as follows. First, silver generation considered all the clothing comfort sensations important when wearing clothes, such as tactile sensation, clothing pressure sensation, thermal/wet sensation, and motion sensation in human physiological aspect. Also, stretchy fabrics were ranked first in awareness, the number of wearing times, and satisfaction of comfort functional fabrics. More than 30% of silver generation have fifteen items out of 36 functional clothes. Second, in analysis of awareness by gender on functional clothing products, women were more aware of health/safety-oriented fabrics than men were. Otherwise, men had more knowledge about the water-related properties of functional fabrics than women have, such as water/moisture absorptive and water-repellent/vapor permeable fabrics. While women have more indoor casual wear, men had more active sportswear. Also, women expressed a strong preference to the stretchy function of fabrics.