This study proposes a region-specific puffiness measure to analyze the silhouette features of Kawaii fashion. The proposed method quantifies region-specific puffiness by dividing the body into upper and lower regions at a body-proportion-based waistline. The datasets used in this study contain five Kawaii fashion styles and six luxury fashion brands. For the luxury fashion brands, outfits were manually categorized as either Typical-style or Kawaii-style. The results show that the five Kawaii fashion styles differ primarily in lower-body puffiness: Lolita exhibits the most voluminous silhouette, while Harajuku-type Kawaii presents a comparatively slimmer silhouette. Among luxury brands, Kawaii-style outfits generally show greater lower-body puffiness than Typical-style outfits, and some brands also show increased upper-body puffiness in their Kawaii-style outfits. These findings suggest that Kawaii fashion is not defined by simply enlarging the entire silhouette; rather, its expression varies by brand and by body region.
Jiang et al. (2026) studied this question.