Re: On Fashion by Georg Simmel

In this latest entry I am responding to an article "On Fashion" written by Georg Simmel about the nature of fashion and our relation too it. The pdf should be handily available if you are interested.

Immediate Impression:

Wow -- There is a lot going on here. An enormous breadth of topics ranging from the most abstract to the most concrete are brought in as demonstrative examples and analogies for fashion. The author attempts to impress upon the reader a sense of the forces of fashion, and the role that they plays in the context of society (he is in the field of sociology).

While this was written in 1957 it seems to predict the monstrous fast fashion of the modern industry based on the motivating forces in human nature. The essential dichotomy that is presented deals with the unifying and segregating forces, through which Simmel presents a sense of the platonic form of fashion for the reader. The two opposing forces motivate the lower classes to imitate the higher and higher classes to escape and innovate to distinction. The imitation provides a borrowed identity of the group at large where the individualism provides an escape and a chance to be noticed. The authors posits that these forces define the transitory nature of fashion and the fleeting, or lasting presence that it has in society.

Personal (occasionally tangential) Perspectives

Thought experiment 1 -- What effects can you identify or might you expect if we apply the forces identified in this article to an era with a the internet and other sophisticated global communication technologies?

1. Memes! - fashionable impressions - things that can be identified with, or set you apart as an individual.

2. Advertising. The ecosystem of advertising attempts to ride the waves created by the forces. Fittingly we have seen a fashion pop up around every type of item imaginable. Thus the advertising market  has attempted to convince people of demand for individual items. 
[ How often do machine learning or neural network based advertising algorithms end up suggesting items inadvertently (or even overtly) based on class distinctions? and how okay is that?
Do interests define class in as much that the impression that we seek to make define the items that we are advertised and subsequently acquire? ]

Thought experiment 2 -- If we consider the impression that we make on the internet as part of our outward appearance and "fashion" and we want to identify behaviors that would follows trends in fashion like extreme individualism, or normcore, grunge, hipster, hopecore how would your internet presence look?

Given modern usage of social networking and image sharing platforms we see adoption of various modes of expression commonly across many people. From selfies, to food pictures, to memes the mechanism of expression seems to follow these same forces of imitation pitted against creativity. We also see the forces layed bare in these platforms in the form of social influencers, from whom we demand content that our own responses and impressions can be based upon.  In this way I think that internet presence can define a fashion and we can imagine the communities that would define an impression which others seek to be a part of. 



I know that I have raised more questions in this article that I have answered. But that is my response. There is a lot of information in the article by Georg Simmel, I definitely suggest that you give it a read. I look forward to hearing supportive, contradictory, or other commentary. h