Xianlin Shao
Dr. Yolanda Santiago Venegas
Writing 1: Introduction to Composition
April 25, 2016
Informative Article: What lies behind Fashion
What is Fashion
Fashion, defined in Wikipedia as a “popular style or practice”, sounds like a fancy floating thing. No one can precisely predict where it came from or what’s the new trend of fashion of next season will be. Everyone is somehow affected by it. People believe that being in fashion leaves others a better impression on you. It’s a magic thing that affects people’s taste.
However, fashion is in fact predictable in some level. If we look into it, it’s an epitome of how human society is constructed.
Fashion life cycle
Trends of fashion raise and declines every other period of time. The general life cycle of fashion can be divided into five stages according to Levy and Weitz:
- Adoption by Fashion leaders. Fashion leaders are the first group of people who adopted the newly emerged trend and performed it in the society, usually represented by fashion designers and celebrities. There are also several deliberate trend-creating events such as Paris Fashion Week, where designers release their new collections and deliberately indicate the society what the new trend will be.
- Spread to larger consumer groups. This is when more and more people adopt the new fashion trend. A famous story would be when the first monkey start washing fruit, all the monkeys on the island would would follow it. This stage revealed the nature of fashion as a collective behavior.
- In this stage, fashion continues to be largely adopted by society and reaches its highest level of social acceptance.
- Decline in Acceptance. People start to get bored by the style and the social acceptance of fashion start to decline until stage 5, obsolescence. ( Levy and Weitz Ch16).
In recent years, due to the rapid development of manufactory industry and internet, this process has been largely speeded up.
Why do people have preferences – Fashion as part of social construction
The Cycle of Fashion
There’s a long term dynamic of people’s taste and fashion comes back after a period of time. For example, wide pants were largely adopted by society in 1960s and declined since after and now it came back to people’s sight. Another example will be people’s favor on the waist height of jeans which has been cycles back and forth every other twenty years. A study conducted by Claus-Christian Carbon also supported that there’s a long term cycle of aesthetic, which indicated that people’s preference on curvature changes dynamically following over time.
Conclusion
Fashion can be scientifically divided into five stages, adoption by fashion leaders, spread to larger consumer groups, saturation, decline in acceptance and obsolescence. It is a collective behavior of human society. Also, there’s a long term dynamics of aesthetic appreciation which pushes a same style from fashionable to obsolesce and back to fashionable over and over again.
Works Cited
Carbon, Claus-Christian. The Cycle of Preference: Long Term Dynamics of Aesthetic Appreciation. Etc.
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