LNAT Practice Passage 7: The Flight of Fashion

The Flight of Fashion

Clothing is seen as a language of personal expression, each wearer assembling colour, cut and ornament into a visible account of the self. Fashion, however, would scarcely exist if dress were only individual, because a style becomes legible by being shared, copied and recognised. The person who chooses a narrow lapel, an austere black coat or an extravagantly impractical shoe may intend to be unlike the crowd, yet can communicate that difference only through signs whose social meaning the crowd already understands. Originality therefore borrows its alphabet from imitation. What appears to be a private decision before the mirror is made within a public system that assigns prestige, vulgarity, seriousness or rebellion to details which, outside that system, would be merely cloth.

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, Thorstein Veblen examined consumption whose usefulness lay partly in being seen, expensive goods displaying not simply comfort but exemption from ordinary necessity. Garments especially suited his argument, since delicate materials, restricted movement and rapid replacement could advertise that the wearer was protected from productive labour. Yet costliness alone cannot explain fashion, for an object may remain expensive after losing distinction, while a cheap detail adopted by the right group may acquire prestige before its price changes. Those who interpret dress solely as a display of wealth consequently mistake the fuel for the engine. Money permits visible waste, but fashion also requires an audience able to read the waste, competitors willing to imitate it, and leaders prepared to abandon a sign once imitation has made it insufficiently exclusive. Georg Simmel, writing on fashion 5 years later in 1904, treated imitation and differentiation not as rival explanations but as movements within the same process. By following a style associated with an admired group, the wearer joins some people and separates from others; when the excluded group copies it, the boundary weakens, and those who depended upon that boundary seek another sign. The copied style has not failed commercially. It may be everywhere precisely because it has failed socially, its popularity destroying the scarcity of recognition for which it was first valued. Fashion changes, on this account, not because taste advances steadily towards beauty, but because a successful signal eventually consumes the difference it was designed to display.

Triumph contains the reason for departure. The style spreads because it signifies distinction, then ceases to distinguish because it has spread. Designers and advertisers do not merely observe this movement; they accelerate, redirect and sometimes counterfeit it, announcing novelty before any established group has conferred prestige upon it. Nor does influence always descend neatly from the wealthy. Work clothes, street styles and garments once treated as provincial may be adopted by prestigious consumers, stripped of their original associations and sold back as cultivated informality. Defenders call this circulation socialistic, because no class can permanently monopolise appearance. Critics see appropriation, since the people who created a style may receive neither authority nor reward when others convert it into fashion. Both responses overlook the peculiar instability of the prize: recognition depends on collective adoption, although too much adoption destroys the distinction being recognised. The market does not solve this contradiction; it repeatedly sells passage through it.

Fashion is therefore less a sequence of arbitrary whims than a system for moving social boundaries before they can settle. It permits belonging and distinction to be purchased in the same object, but never secured for long, since every visible success invites the imitation that will undo it. The garment changes; the chase remains through every social season.