By Noreen Flanagan If you need to explain away any fall/winter retail therapy binges, here are two studies that might come in handy when you’re asked to defend why you absolutely needed Alexander Wang’s tailored wool jacket or Phoebe Philo’s cropped trouser. Your first line of defence? Blame a celebrity. According to Dutch researchers our brains go all batty when we look at pictures of celebs to see what they’re wearing. For the study, women were asked to look at 40 pictures of celebrities and  regular folk who were wearing the same shoes. When the women looked at star shots, the medial oribitofrontal cortex in their brains buzzed. The ho-hum images of non-stars didn’t inspire any increased activity. In their report, which appeared in the Journal of Economic Psychology, the researchers concluded that when we link a product with a celebrity this generates a feeling of affection. So how does this fondness encourage a fashion splurge?
(more…)