Fashion

Conceptual Overview

Thus, fashion was originally portrayed as an irrational deviation from rational behavior. Because of the stubbornness of the phenomenon, however, its simple denigration to the status of deviant behavior did not make it less conspicuous. This fact was noticed by the economist Paul Nystrom as early as 1928, when he set out to find a rational explanation of fashions. He adopted Veblen's insights, but applied business logic to them. As there is high demand for articles about what is and isn't fashionable, they must have utility, he reasoned, although this utility is, in fact, the advertisement of a capacity for conspicuous leisure or conspicuous consumption.

Quite early in the debate there also existed other ways of conceptualizing fashion. One early theoretician of fashion as a cultural phenomenon was Gabriel Tarde, who claimed in 1890 that fashion was already a strong force in antiquity, although he admitted, in agreement with the later scholars of fashion from Fernand Braudel to Elizabeth Wilson, that it was the 18th century that inaugurated the rule of fashion on a large scale. He was also first to point out fashion's paradoxical character: people follow fashion for the pleasure of change and to be different from others, but once the way dictated by fashion becomes truly popular, it becomes the common way of doing things and is no longer fashionable.

Writing in 1904, Georg Simmel seemed to agree with Spencer and Veblen, but he also continued along Tarde's train of thought. He saw in fashion a democratic and democratizing phenomenon, intensifying with the progress of civilization. This was because fashion connected two opposing tendencies: equalization and individualization.

The original focus on the trickle-down direction of reverential imitation diverted attention from the “trickle-up” and especially “trickle-across” effects. Yet, the trickle-up effect is not new. Simmel claimed that fashion for both genders is usually invented at the margins, and only legitimized when it has been adopted by higher classes, from which it then “trickles down” to the middle classes.

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