In a departure from the usual fare on this website, I would like to discuss the fashion industry. I do so because I want to deal with an argument used by the fashion industry that has long bothered me, which is, that being fashionable makes a person look better.
I have never believed this to be true. On the contrary, I believe that fashion is merely a manifestation of one’s lemming instinct, i.e. a desire to conform to what those around one wears, but only recently has a proof for this proposition occurred to me. A simple example can illustrate it. Take the hemline of women’s skirts. If the purpose of fashion were to make people look better than it would always be fashionable for women with nice legs to wear short skirts and for women with not nice legs (think Hillary Clinton) to wear long dresses. But this is not so. It is fashionable either for all women, regardless of the beauty of their legs, to wear short skirts or for all women, regardless of their legs, to wear long skirts. In other words, at any given point in time, some women are forced to wear clothes that are less than suitable to them only because that is what all the other women are doing.
This means that the motivation for fashionable people is not so much to look better but to blend in more with their surroundings. This makes the people at the top of the fashion world alpha lemmings, who are at the top of the fashion food chain only because they have the ability to predict what will be in fashion for beta lemmings next year.
But
what about us non-lemmings, what should we do? We could walk around purposely
avoiding current styles, but then we will just end up looking weird, which is
distracting. No, I think we should follow the teachings of Thomas Jefferson who
said: “In matters of fashion, swim with the
current. In matters of conscience, stand like a rock.” In other words, hold
your nose and go with flow but without going to any ridiculous extremes or
spending too much time or money on style. In this way your fashion sense does
not adversely affect more important matters but you do not spend too much
effort on it either.
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