Awe in fashion tourism: a multidimensional perspective

Purpose This conceptual paper aims to introduce awe as a fundamental emotional mechanism in fashion tourism. It elaborates on how fashion-related practices evoke awe through four distinct forms of vastness and how this leads to tourists’ change and growth. Design/methodology/approach This paper follows a typology-development approach for conceptual papers by synthesizing insights from fashion tourism, experiential consumption, transformative tourism and awe research. By synthesizing these insights, this paper bridges key gaps in the literature, proposes a conceptual model of awe in fashion tourism and suggests a research agenda on theory, contexts and methods to advance the marketing and management of destinations and fashion brands. Practical implications are provided. Findings This paper proposes that sensory, collective, temporal and narrative vastness serve as appraisals of the emotion of awe in fashion tourism. Awe then triggers four core psychological mechanisms of transcendence: intrapersonal, interpersonal, transtemporal and transpersonal, which lead to fashion tourists’ change and growth. Originality/value This study investigates the important emotion of awe in fashion tourism. It develops a typology of perceived vastness (sensory, collective, temporal and narrative) that explains how fashion-related practices exceed tourists’ ordinary experiences in destinations. This paper advances fashion tourism theorizing beyond pleasure-based accounts by positioning awe as a conceptual bridge between curated fashion-related experiences and fashion tourists’ change and growth. This paper also extends transformative tourism (mainly focused on volunteering, nature and pilgrimage) by explaining another trigger related to awe-inspiring experiences. In addition, it offers a structured agenda for future research.