Materialistic Girls Watching a Materialistic World: Fashion TV Series and Women’s Copy-Cat Intentions

Inspired by the popularity of TV series such as Gossip Girl, The City and The Hills which revolve around the world of fashion, this article examines whether and how these series are related to young women’s willingness to purchase products that allow them to replicate the appearances of the main characters. The results demonstrated that in particular women with materialistic orientations would like to emulate the main characters. The mechanisms underlying this relation are that materialistic women watch fashion TV series to gain fashion inspiration; subsequently they watch these series more frequently, and this behavior is related to increased copy-cat intentions.