The Mechanism of Fashion

What is interesting to me is how it is decided who makes the trend.

I think for most people to adopt a fashion it has to feel 'right', as in aesthetically 'right' at some level. Although they also want the status or 'coolness' (in the eyes of others) I don't think they will adopt it if they don't like it. But where that sense of something being 'right' comes from I'm not sure. I suppose it might be partly from the eye getting used to a certain look and then confusing that sub-conscious recognition with 'liking' it. I've experienced something like that often myself where an initial dislike of a trend has been eroded *. All this would work for mid period adopters but not for early trend setters. Actually it would also work for all but the earliest trend setters because they could be operating on the same level, just more rarefied (ie immersed in fashion mags and/or closely knit scenes).

* OTOH some trends I just don't like eg those pointy womens' shoes that came back into vogue a few years ago but I STILL don't like them for some reason. And Doctor Martens...I've always disliked them, in or out of fashion, although in that (DMs) case it might well be a lot more to do with an irrational sense that I don't like the people who wear/have worn them rather than an aesthetic view on the shape of the shoe itself.

certainly nobody could ever by a fucking suv out of an aestetic sense of fashion: only the assoiciated ideas could motivate them. I think it's immoral to buy ugly cars.

The newness in car design seems not to be redesigns of existing models but the introduction or popularization of new models with iconic designs like Mini Coopers or Hummers.

A car is such a big-ticket item and massive investment that it has the potential to be a huge signifier of aesthetic values but let's not forget the obvious use-value as well. How ugly a car would you be willing to drive if you needed to?

The question of whether fashion drives consumerism or exists to legitimize it is interesting. It is all a problem of where to put excess capital, I think.

I know I shouldn't lard any of this with guilt--but the economic issue of surplus wealth and what to do with it, also the issue of resources and their finitude, do seem to bring in an ethical dimension.

(a) Seeing fashion as primarily aesthetic leaves something out, to me: beyond that is the fact that it's a tool of communication. People judge one another visually; "fashion" is basically the sum total of what you can communicate visually apart from your own God-given body. If fashion were entirely about ornamenting oneself with symbols of wealth the consumption criticism would have more sway with me, but that's certainly not the sum total of it.

(b) And anything communicative in that way is bound to work in trends, I think, since most people are pretty much in agreement about certain key things they'd like to communicate about themselves. I think a better model for fashion trends isn't planned obsolescence or constant acquisition but rather the regular old model of popularization and normalization. Of all the possible things to wear, someone hits upon something that manages to communicate what most of us want to communicate, which without going into it we'll just say is that we're "cool." An element of this "cool" is "special" or "different." Alternately, there's the pressing concern for most people not to be too different to the point where we seem, in our individual environments, to be "strange." (And yes, everyone has this concern: we all make different decisions about how far we want to go down this line, but we all have limits somewhere, as dictated by what effect our fashion would have on our interactions with others.) So someone finds something that signifies "cool" in part because it's interesting; their wearing it, by definition, makes it less interesting, allowing people further along the cool-or-just-strange spectrum to wear it too; and so on. This model tends to be applicable to pretty much any consumer-lifestyle thing.

(c) Basically I don't think this is incredibly shallow. Certainly it can be and in loads of cases is, yeah, and in lots of ways -- from inordinate fashion obsession to wealth-display designer fetish to whatever else. (Both of these things just "communicate" to me wrong: the fashion-obsessive, just like a record geek, winds up communicating to non-fashion-obsessives that he or she cares more than we'd like about a certain thing; the conspicuous consumer communicates some variant of snobbery.) But like I said, people form visual impressions of one another: I have a pretty high tolerance for people's trying to manipulate that visual impression and communicate things about themselves that way. Not so high that I don't think some people are going way overboard, but probably higher than most. Especially with shoes.

How does wearing something make it by definition less interesting? If I wear a dress made of credit cards does that make credit cards less interesting?

Also, F, I'm intersted in your question above about the arbiters of fashion. Cause it seems that at any given point the fashion that communicates "cool" does so because it's associated with a certain lifestyle that has some sort of cachet. But what lifestyles are considered to have cachet is in issue that moves in trends as well -- hence the belief that on some basic level all fashion is socio-political, however indirectly. (This is a common belief, right? I can think of at least two books I've worked with where academics use fashion to try and chart social transformations, and it's definitely an idea I buy, on the broadest scale. It all gets filtered heavily by the fashion industry and the consumption end of things and the tendency for people to sell the look of an Other group, but in the end ... people wearing trucker hats says something, doesn't it? Not just about fashion or aesthetics but about culture on a much greater level?)