Abstract
Guilt and its mechanisms are a relevant way to understand consumers' behaviour towards fashion luxury purchases. Fashion is a huge industry, which proposes products based on subjective and personal affects. Clothes have to fit, to make people feel comfortable and good looking and not just to be useful. Designers sell dreams to consumers; they create a need which is not just to be dressed but to be well-dressed, fashionable. But at the same time, the fashion industry creates stereotypes and makes pressure on consumers. Then, the main question is to know if guilt is effective in fashion business, in other words if the unconscious mechanism of guilt triggers off in purchases such as luxury clothes or accessories which are well known to be "futile" or unnecessary. But in realty, this apparent "uselessness" is at the heart of this debate because if we refer to the main definition of guilt, we notice that guilt is an affective state in which one experiences conflict at having done something one believes one should not have done.
