A Research on Difference Between Consumer Perception of Slow Fashion and Consumption Behavior of Fast Fashion: Application of Topic Modeling with Big Data

초록

The article deals with the proposition that consumers' fashion consumption behavior will still follow the consumption behavior of fast fashion, despite recognizing the importance of slow fashion. The research model to verify this proposition is topic modeling with big data including unstructured textual data. After combining news articles posted on Naver news search platform during the 2003-2019 period, high-frequency words have been derived, major keywords have been examined using word-cloud technique, and topics have been found using LDA model. Based on these, we examined consumers' perception and consumption behavior on slow fashion by considering the centrality and connectivity of the topics through the analysis of Topic Network. It used two keywords, fast fashion and slow fashion, and collected a total of 5,506 articles. The main findings of the analysis are: (1) Looking at the status of annual article collection, consumers' interest in slow fashion mainly began in 2005 and showed a steady increase up to 2019; (2) Term Frequency analysis showed that the keywords for slow fashion are the lowest, with consumers' consumption patterns continuing around 'brand'; (3) Each topic’s weight in articles showed that 'social value' - which includes slow fashion - ranked sixth among the 9 topics, low linkage with other topics (mainly of consumption topics). (4) The topic ‘social value’ had low linkage with others on JSON visualization as well, so we concluded that this was not a considerable factor of consumption behavior. (5) Analysis of Topic Network showed that 'brand' and 'fashion trend' were key topics, and the topic 'social value' accounted for a low proportion. To sum, consumption patterns in fashion sector are still dominated by general consumption patterns centered on brands and fast fashion.

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