where do fashions come from?
where do fashions come from?
According to Adam Smith, the founding father of the modern economic science and liberalism,
"It is from our disposition to admire, and consequently to imitate, the rich and the great, that they are enabled to set, or to lead what is called the fashion. Their dress is the fashionable dress; the language of their conversation, the fashionable style; their air and deportment, the fashionable behaviour. Even their vices and follies are fashionable; and the greater part of men are proud to imitate and resemble them in the very qualities which dishonour and disgrace them".
This theory is echoed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction (1979), in which he states that aesthetic preferences are "class markers", which reflect the possession of resources that are not only economical but also cultural (that explains why the "nouveaux riches" always have as much trouble as the underprivileged to understand the principles of "good taste").
While also echoing Adam Smith’s Trickle-down theory, Georg Simmel extends it by explaining the elite’s motivation to constantly shift towards new styles: fashion’s continuous reform comes, from the ruling classes’ will to separate themselves from the masses. Moreover, a symmetric dynamic can be found at the heart of the perpetual renewal of fashion, in the imitation of ruling classes’ clothing habits by inferior social categories, forcing the elite to adopt new styles in order to appear new again.
This vision of fashion rests on an assumption that is nowadays widely contradicted, whereby the elites determine the shifts in fashion preferences. We can easily find examples of fashion movements which follow the opposite trajectory, going bottom up.
Blumer says that fashion movements have two specific moments of manifestation:
*first, when the collections are presented, through fashion shows and showrooms displaying the entirety of a brand’s collection,
*then, downstream of this presentation, when the buyers from the stores that distribute the collection make their selection.
The fashion moments are not the result of a differentiation mechanism whose goal is to renew styles as quickly as possible in order to distinguish some parts of the social entity, but the consequence of the selection, by an expert group, of a determined amount of shapes, colors, and materials. Blumer argues that the "expert group" composed by fashion designers and buyers both present an impressive consistency of preferences, which he finds responsible for the creation of fashion movements, or, in other words, of clothing mimicry: as consumers in a specific society have access to a limited amount of styles that have been preselected by an expert group with consistent tastes, it is logical that they all dress the same. What is left to explain are the criteria according to which this double selection is made, and why it appears to be so homogenous.
Blumer excludes the idea of coordination: the "caste" of fashion designers is "secret" and competitive, as is the buyers’. Designers converge towards the same ensemble of choices, each season because they share three categories of preoccupations from which they draw their inspirations:
the first being the history of costume, the second the immediate clothing habits, and the third the contemporary artistic production. Taking inspiration from past styles is a recurring habit of fashion designers, who were the first to read historic books regarding the story of costume published in the second part of the 19th century: traditional clothing, as well as the creations of the past decades, provides designers with an impressive catalog of images. Fashion designers have also in mind the clothing habits of their immediate contemporaries. When Blumer’s article is published, fashion has opened to ready-to-wear, and as a result, designers have to pay more and more attention to "street fashion". Here again, their job is to reinterpret, through a series of variations, outfits that they witnessed in vivo. But the most fundamental common point between designers, and, for Blumer, the main reason for the similarity of their taste lies in their "intimate familiarity with the most recent expressions of modernity". As they "engage in translating themes from these areas and media into dress designs", they establish a necessary proximity with the other fields of the contemporary creation: their work becomes the translation, in clothing language, of ideas which appeared elsewhere.
It is even more true at an age where fashion is liberated from the academism of Haute couture, mainly through the development of ready-to-wear and the emergence of youth culture. Blue jeans, for instance, are one of the most famous examples illustrating this phenomenon: originally worn by American workers of the 19th century, they are nowadays a worldwide popular uniform, available at all of society’s sections. So we need to find another candidate to explain the origin of fashion "trends".
Herbert Blumer is one of the most famous opponents to Simmel and Smith’s common theory. He argues that the elites themselves undergo the influence of a universal drive towards novelty. For Blumer, "fashions", in the sense of clothing shifts, are the direct result of specific interactions between individuals who share similar interests and perceptions.It is the observation of "fashion stakeholders", as an "environment", and the understanding of its stakeholders subjective motivations, of their perception system as well as their tastes, that allow us to understand the origin of the convergence of preferences phenomenon.
Eventually, Blumer describes fashion creation as a "derivative" form of creation: its substance comes simultaneously from fashion history, contemporary clothing habits, and recent developments in other arts. According to Blumer, the second selection group, the buyers, doesn't share the designers’ specific choices, yet they share everything else that determines their choices: they read the same magazines, go to the same cities, restaurants, and parties, see the same movies, and take passionately interest in fashion’s twists and turns, both on the catwalk and in the streets. They are part of the same "remarkably common world of intense stimulation": their perceptual environment is identical. Based on this set of intellectual and sensorial stimulations, they anticipate the shifts of fashions and customer’s tastes: it is no wonder, thus, that their anticipations stay consistent. Blumer draws, from these empiric considerations, a general theory about the origin of fashion movements.
According to him, "The fashion mechanism appears not in response to a need of class differentiation and class emulation but in response to a wish to be in fashion, to be abreast of what has good standing, to express new tastes which are emerging in a changing world". In other words, fashions are not the result of the preferences of the ruling classes, but the consequence of an expert selection determined by minds which are deeply aware of the style novelties: fashion designers and buyers.
Yet, Blumers’ argumentation is not faultless: the data drawn from his inquiry doesn’t seem satisfactory to accredit his general conclusions. Blumer makes an additional implicit hypothesis, which doesn’t rely on his observations, whereby the desire for novelty would be socially or anthropologically prior to the desire of domination or differentiation from other individuals.
In other words, even if Blumer convincgly shows that fashion movements are not driven by elites, he doesn’t bring any decisive argument to the table in favor of the presence of a pre-existing, independent "fashion desire". We can also suppose that novelty is a mere instrument in order to achieve social distinction: as we observe, following Blumer, that fashions are the result of a collegial decision between specialists, we can also notice that it remains a device of class-affirmation or self-affirmation, as it is the expression of a superior economic or cultural capital. To be fashionable remains expensive, on the intellectual level as well as on the economic level.