Objective Women's clothing design centered on human form is mainly based on women's figure, highlighting the beauty of curves and proportions. Utilizing different forms of illusion to modify the clothing can bring visual and psychological pleasure, thus producing an impact on the perception of the body shape and achieving an ideal dress effect.Method The experiment took dresses as the research carrier, screened 67 college students as subjects, and based on the research method of Kansei Engineering and cognitive psychology technology, used Adobe Illustrator software to draw sample pictures and HSB color attribute model to adjust the color brightness, to explore the symmetrical division and nine levels of brightness changes in the apparel design on the perception of human body shape of the sense of thinness, the sense of liking The sensual evaluation of the human body shape in clothing design.Results The laws of clothing segmentation ratio and color brightness for the thinness and likability of clothing are generally consistent. The color of the deepest luminance has the highest sense of thinness and likability, and the sense of thinness and likability in the second deepest luminance is not the second highest, and all the perception scores are not in line with the traditional cognition of " the deeper the color luminance, the higher the sense of thinness". Visual cognition of thinness under the change of luminance; In the symmetric proportion model, with the increase of the proportion of green samples and red samples to the segmentation line, the thinness of all luminance shows a general trend of increasing and then decreasing. Visual perception of thinness under the change of segmentation ratio; in the symmetric ratio mode, as the brightness of the color becomes darker, the thinness scores of the segmentation ratio show an overall increasing trend. Visual perception of likability under the change of luminance: in the symmetric ratio model, as the proportion of the segmentation line increases, the green sample shows a general trend of increasing and then decreasing, and the red sample shows a general trend of increasing. Visual cognition of apparent thinness under the change of segmentation ratio; in the symmetric ratio model, as the brightness of green samples and red samples become darker, the overall trend of the likability cognition scores of the segmentation ratio shows a rising trend. For the samples without extreme scores, the actual scores are not significant, ranging from 2.5 to 3.5, and fluctuating above and below the "average" option. The reasons for this are as follows; in terms of the subjects, the data were selected as the average of all the people, because the number of subjects was large, and the process was not subdivided into groups of subjects, so it is possible that the typical data differences of many subdivided groups were hidden; in terms of the samples, the crotch difference of the classification was set too small, resulting in the differences between the samples not being significant enough. Conclusion The mechanism of how clothing segmentation design and luminance affects body perception and consumer psychology is investigated, providing a reliable quantitative basis for clothing companies and designers in the process of apparel development and design, and providing a reference basis for apparel consumers and apparel brands, which can help to enhance the effect of product development and regulate consumers' satisfaction with their bodies. Kansei Engineering in the field of apparel design related to a very broad application of research space, the experiment did not involve the audience of all ages and occupations, so that the results of the experiment has a certain degree of constraints, the need to expand the scope of the subjects in future research, to strengthen the validity of the experimental data. In the next experiments, we can try to subdivide the subjects into personalized groups, analyze the differences in cognitive scores between different subdivided groups, or reduce the crotch difference of physical parameters of the samples, and then do the validation experiments. © 2024 China Textile Engineering Society. All rights reserved.