Individuals typically fit in with the fashions of their time rather than entirely invent their own. What happens to be popular during our lifespans, and especially our younger lives when we more often seek fashionable options, is a matter of luck. Most of us have only a slight impact on these decisions. What are the unintended consequences that can follow?
What is fashion? I struggled to answer this basic question before writing this post but feel comfortable with a potential definition. Fashion is the way to distinguish oneself within bounds. We mostly think of fashion in terms of clothing, but it’s broader than that. Politics, food, beliefs, language can all be part of one’s fashion too. Maybe another definition would be fashion is how we identify ourselves by what we put on or in our bodies.
You find identity through fashion all around. Here are quotes from two books that are only peripherally about fashion. Yet the discuss of style and identity fits in with their stories.
“We were dressed in the heighth of fashion, which in those days was these very wide trousers and a very loose black shiny leather like jerkin over an open-necked shirt with a like scarf tucked in. At this time too it was the heighth of fashion to use the old britva on the gulliver, so that most of the gulliver was like bald and there was hair only on the sides.” — from A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, here talking about the style worn by the main character’s gang.
And then there’s this book from the 1800s.
“The rules of the service insured that every face should be clean-shaven, every head powdered, and every neck covered by the little queue of natural hair tied with a black silk ribbon.” — from Rodney Stone, by Arthur Conan Doyle, here discussing the enforced style of the Royal Navy.
Who decides?
Who decides what is “in” fashion? Here too there’s variation, but maybe we can say that fashion comes from a combination of top-down and bottom-up actions.
Top-down fashion is decided by committee for the benefit of large-scale supply chain and production runs. The historical slowness of mass production requires commitments, coordination, and decisions made well in advance for large markets. It’s worth doing because of the company benefits of access to the scale. Some “fast fashion” companies like Zara try to get around this by noticing a trend and then optimizing for production speed. But most mass fashion overall is still pretty slow. A quote from a fashion movie explains.
“You go to your closet and you select that lumpy, loose sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent who showed cerulean military jackets, and then cerulean quickly shot up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through department stores, and then trickled on down onto some tragic Casual Corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think you made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.” — Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada
Bottom-up fashion comes from something that emerges naturally and is then spread upward in spending power. With the modern supply chain example described above it could also eventually go from top-down too. Examples include the way prostitutes in pre-revolutionary France defined fashion for courtiers, how (possibly) the habit of prisoners going without belts led to the sagging pants style that has been popular for over 20 years.
Fashion emergence. There’s also an argument that fashion is what happens when a mix jumble of different influences and subtle differences combine to form whatever is “in” fashion at any given time and place. The top-down decision-makers and bottom-up fashion combine and something new, and maybe unpredictable comes out.
Suffering for it
Some well-known examples of the way pursuing fashion causes people to suffer.
White lead in cosmetics. White lead, or Venetian Ceruse, is responsible for the poisoning of fashion lovers like Marie Gunning (the It girl of mid-1700s England). These cosmetics were a short-run / long-run trade-off. In the short-run, they did make one’s skin look whiter (as was the style) and could cover blemishes well. In the long-run one’s skin could develop even worse blemishes than before. And then there was the lead poisoning.
There are some claims that the use of lead in cosmetics mattered less in centuries past since wearers were likely to die early of something else anyway. These arguments confuse shorter life expectancy (mostly due to infant and child mortality) with the intent to shorten one’s life through poisonous fashion.
But going from the shorter life argument, there is also some belief that eyeliners containing low dosages of lead may have had short-term positive effects in ancient Egypt. Some people died of other causes before the lead poisoning caught up with them.
Skin whitening. Different from covering the skin with a whitener, as above, skin whitening methods sought the color change of the skin itself. Users suffered burns, infections from breaks in their skin, and more.
Sagging pants. Wearers of this style suffer from back, knee, leg, and foot problems from adopting a different gait to keep the pants from falling completely down.
Shoes. High heels encourage the formation of foot bunions, which are either endured or treated with cushions and surgery. Running shoes (especially the older thick-soled style) encourage longer strides and increase knee injuries from the more jarring running style.
Foot binding. The practice lasted in China for 1,000 years. Even in the 19th century in parts of China around half of women had their feet bound. Those with bound feet dealt with the pain of the process, potential infection, and greater dependence on assistance from others.
Monocles, pince nez, eyeglasses, contact lenses. Eyesight modification that people received depended on when they lived. Eyeglass and lens technology improved over the years so that eyeglass lenses were able to become larger and easier to see through, in comparison to lenses from centuries ago. But then fashion makes the width of eyeglass frames vary over time. The large glasses of the 1980s (better for natural vision) were replaced by smaller frames in the 1990s and 2000s. The trend has partially swung back to larger frames for the time being. Also, depending on when one lived, there may have been an option to wear contact lenses, often preferred over eyeglasses. Early contact lenses were rigid and made of glass, leading at least to discomfort.
Mercury poisoning from felt hat preparation. This impact was mostly felt by producers of the hats, not the wearers. “The hatting trade became dangerous in the seventeenth century when the ‘carroting’ process was discovered. Hat makers found that using mercury nitrate to wash the partially shaped felt greatly accelerated the felting process by breaking down the fibers more quickly… Over the course of three centuries — carroting with mercury was not forbidden in the United States until 1941 — uncounted thousands of hatters breathed in mercury fumes as they worked, and a substantial number had their health destroyed.” — from Where We Worked: A Celebration Of America’s Workers And The Nation They Built
Consumer and Social Costs. Fashion brings extra value to apparel and shoes. It therefore should be pricier than purely functional apparel and shoes (if there are such things) regardless of costs to produce. Then again, tell that to a parent who feels that they need to support their kids’ choice of clothing to keep them fashionable. Overall, the extended cost of waste must be borne somewhere, whether or not they are directly felt or known by the eventual consumers. Related to current fashions, the production of jeans results in toxic sludge that often runs off and pollutes water sources near the source of production.
The supplies. Other victims of fashion are the supplies needed to make articles of clothing. Animals used for pelts suffered from hunting, sometimes to endangerment or extinction. Other animals benefited (depending on how you look at it) from being raised domestically for pelt or feather production even when that meant that more of them lived in captivity. Baby seals have felt historical demand for their pelts in a very different way than ostriches felt demand for their feathers. The seals are committed (one pelt, must kill the animal) but the ostriches are involved (many feathers, not needed to kill the bird).
Being in on the joke. Palessi was an attempt by discount brand Payless Shoes’ (and an ad agency) to show the world that their shoes are just as good as elite brands. Or that perception is everything. The company staged the launch of an Italian shoe brand — the fake Palessi — and attracted fashion influencers who purchased shoes for up to $1,000. Payless later let the buyers in on the joke.
Considerations
- Depending on when you live, and especially when you are young, fashion will be a part of the decisions you make in how you look and spend your money.
- Some people will be lucky and look good in the current fashion. Some will suffer health issues through their attempt to keep up with fashion trends.
- Choosing a specific color or fabric that will be more popular for a few seasons can have effects on pollution, depending on factors like waste runoff from fabric and dye production and excess shipping costs for heavier fabrics like denim. At scale, the fashion industry determines what types of pollution will be produced and where it will be produced.
- Fashion extends beyond what we put on our bodies. Other types of fashion not explored here include what we put in our bodies and minds (food and information).