Fashion

By peace | January 8, 2007

“It’s the fashion” we often hear. The fashion may be short skirts, a certain make of car, Swedish interior design, the colour blue, folk music or anything else which happens to affect our lives. The fashion may be a book which enjoys ephemeral fame, or a turn of phrase, or a person. Even ideas and attitudes alter with the passing of time.

There is nothing more certain than that a sudden, widespread enthusiasm will wane, it will “go out of fashion” and return to oblivion. The objects of such interest almost always end up by being abandoned. People tire of them and they are forgotten. Tastes change rapidly. Fashion expresses the desire for novelty and change.

The word “mode” is often applied to fashion, usually to fashions in dress. If something is à la mode it is fashionable. “Mode” is a French word, from the Latin modus, and was first used in England in the seventeenth century.

Yet the phenomenon to which it refers occurred long before the word came into use. Fashion was always existed, inspired and encouraged by man’s vanity. Every season the designers (or “creators of fashion”) produce new models, promoting a particular style or colour, and these gradually affect the clothes people wear. Sooner or later, we accept the changes. Think of the changes there have been in skirts in recent years. It was “unfashionable” for a woman to wear a skirt of the “wrong” length, but today the situation is more flexible and skirt lengths vary considerably.

Fashion needs time to become accepted. It arouses curiosity, desire, imitation and even envy. Public opinion always has to overcome an initial rejection and hostile amazement. In the twenties, the first women to bob their hair were frowned on and regarded very dubiously. This may make us smile today, but think of the scandal caused by topless sunbathing on some Mediterranean beaches, which is only a fashion. Before it was generally accepted, as it is now, the other great bathing scandal was the bikini, which is bound to be with us for a very long time.

There are occasions when by the time the last people have accepted a fashion, those who were enthusiastic at the beginning have already tired of it and are turning to something else. The time required for this to happen has varied through history and used to be very much longer than it is now. Styles of clothing, jewellery, furniture and houses, for example, lasted for decades or even centuries: think how long the Roman toga remained in fashion.

In the past, fashion was only the concern of the aristocracy and the rich; it never affected the poorer people who for generations continued to wear the same kind of old rags and were content with the same poor objects. Usually some eminent personage was indirectly responsible for instigating a major change, using a great ball, an evening at the theatre or some other society function to display a new style. It was enough for the king to forget to do up the bottom button of his waistcoat or for the Prince of Wales’s manservant to turn up the bottoms of his master’s trousers because they were too long, for these details to be copied immediately by everyone in society.

Today fashions change more quickly, accompanied by reports and comments from the press, television, radio and of course, by advertising. We can open any newspaper and see dozens of new suggestions and ideas which are seized on by the trade. Suppose one season there is a fashion for blue and yellow stripes. The shops and stores are immediately supplied with clothing in stripes of these colours, to suit all tastes and requirements, in varying quality and at a variety of prices.

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