subscribe to this pageA sociologist writing in the 1990s, Davis explores how trends are determined. He posits fashion as a cycle, in which popular trends fade into oblivion, only to be resuscitated later. However, this cycle has grown short and fragmented as multiple trends gain popularity at the same time and new trends come into and fade from popularity with increasing speed. Davis seeks to determine what causes the fashion cycle to shift by examining different theories. The first of these theories is the trickle-down theory, which posits creation in the hands of the upper classes. Their styles are eventually copied by the lower classes, and as they are replicated, they no longer become fashionable. Davis criticizes this theory for focusing only on class, arguing instead that fashion is a complex form of personal expression that can reveal one’s age, gender, sexual identity, political leanings, leisure inclinations, religious beliefs and more. Davis also points out that while sociology provides a lens for examining how fashion cycles, it fails to account for what the cycle means.
Instead, Davis favors Blumer’s theory of collective selection, in which fashion is driven by tastes and perpetuated by the need to be fashionable. Taste accounts for fashions rising in both small groups and across the mainstream and is influenced by shared life experiences and common interaction. For Blumer, fashion is tied to “modernism”, which he defines as “restlessness, an openness to new experience and fascination with the new.” Finally, he argues that fashion’s quickly cycling trends serves a useful societal function, in ordering the styles of the present, detaching current trends from outdated ones and preparing the populace for future trends. While this theory seems to represent fashion cycles more accurately than the class-ist model, it too fails to provide a methodology for interpreting the meanings behind various fashion statements. Davis worries that both theories are abstract and outdated, shedding little insight into the complex world of fashion and failing to account for the influence and force of the fashion industries.
Davis’s unease with available theories of fashion cycling point to the size and complexity of forces driving what becomes stylish -- forces which have grown even more complex with the advent of fashion blogs. While theories of trickle-down fashion and collective selection seem problematic even to Davis, they still provide two useful, if incomplete, methods for thinking about fashion in the 21 Century. Trickle-down theory and collective selection represent two ends of the spectrum in which one seeks to understand fashion – in the former, fashion is imposed on the populace from above and they have little or no say control over it, and in the latter, fashion is a bottom up process developed by the masses in response to shared experiences. The privileged fashion elite of the trickle-down theory sound remarkably like Gladwell’s innovators, and the trickle-down effect seems to perfectly describe Gladwell’s adoption of trends. While Gladwell’s theory is based on privileged social knowledge as opposed to class, both theories employ similar mechanisms.
Moreover, Blumer’s model of collective selection seems a precursor to Riekert’s fashion model, in which styles favored by online readers are then translated into market goods. Both posit societal taste as the driving force behind fashion, granting the people agency in determining what becomes popular. Yet while Blumer’s model presents taste as organic, arising from life experience, Riekert portrays taste as the ability to adopt or reject options presented by bloggers and by the trendsetters themselves.
This now famous article by Malcolm Gladwell is known for first coining the term “cool-hunters” to refer to fashion industry detectives who scour the streets for new trends, as seen on cutting-edge urban hipsters. Gladwell also notes that the 1990s marked a new era, in which what was cool was no longer determined by couture houses, but by elusive street hipsters whose style changed whenever the fashion industries began to introduce similar styles into their newest lines. The result was a new type of participatory culture – where style was controlled by “cool” people outside of the corporation, whose privileged social knowledge still granted them power as an elite group, even though they were spread across the globe and had no formal connections to the industry.
Yet as the fashion industry became better and better at copying trends it observed on the street, those on the cutting edge became more and more elusive, because “the act of discovering cool is what causes cool to move on.” Thus, Gladwell posits fashion as a bottom-up process which incorporates trends and ideas developed by different groups throughout the world. He characterizes the fashion crowd as existing in five groups: innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority and laggards. Coolhunters seek out the innovators in the hopes of being the first to feature a trend, as such success would boost their company’s image and sales. Seeking out innovators is easier than searching for innovative items, since trends change so quickly.
Gladwell constructs his argument based on interviews with cool-hunters, as well as his own experiences traveling with cool-hunters “on the hunt”. He adopts the persona of a knowledgeable fly-on-the-wall, providing insightful commentary of all he recounts. Gladwell’s believability is evident through the lasting adaptation of the term “cool-hunter”, as well as the article’s frequent use in the classroom setting (such as “Media and Popular Culture”, a class at the Annenberg School of Communication). While Gladwell was among the first to describe fashion in this way, his ideas are firmly rooted in postmodernism. The world of fashion, constructed from the opinions and ideas of cool folk from around the world and reassembled by the fashion industry for mass market appeal, epitomizes a highly regarded aesthetic innovation ultimately driven by capitalism. At the same time, the world Gladwell describes is poised on the brink of a postmodern capitalist economy and the new (post-postmodern?) blogosphere. If the fashion industry in 1997 (the time of this article’s publication) was driven by an elusive cool crowd whose styles were forever changing, the democracy of blogging tools ten years later has demystified this crowd, capturing and detailing their style through photographs featured on fashion blogs accessible to all.