Is Fashion Conventional?

Social sciences are based on experience: they can only make verifiable statements for particular groups and specific collective organizations. Authors like Simmel or Veblen seem to have drawn conclusions too broad from the empirical premises they could deal with. This is probably why we feel that their vision of fashion is at best true of only a limited subset of the human behaviors involved with fashion related activities, and not universally true of them. In this video we suggest to follow a different path. Contrary to social sciences, who start with factual evidence, try to discover regularities and infer explaining rules from it, analytic philosophy starts with popular topic-related insights, and apply conceptual analysis to them.

 at the end of the day can the philosopher assess the relevance of the theory to a class of phenomena. So let’s try this way with fashion. There are many popular insights relevant to fashion. Here are a few important ones that we may have already met. 

1.Fashion is normative: it dictates a certain type of behavior. Being fashionable is to conform to certain rules that impose a desirable behavior.

 2. Fashion is social: being fashionable alone is meaningless, fashion is a collective phenomenon.

3.Fashion is causally opaque: it is not easy to locate the causes of a fashion movement is it a decision from the industry? From the general public? From a minority? Who is a fashion authority ? 

4. Fashion is functionally opaque: it is not easy to tell what its purpose is. Is is pure entertainment? Is it a distinction mechanism? Is it purposeless ? 

5. Fashion is an ambiguous word, that refers both to a structure that perpetuates itself (the collective similarity of dress) and to the present instantiation of this structure, that will be replaced at a later stage. 

Fashion displays the main attributes of coordination problems. A coordination problem is defined by the following features: 

It is a problem that gathers individual agents who share similar interests. In fashion, individuals have the same interest: to be fashionable. Each agent must choose between several alternative options. In fashion one has to select one’s outfits (fashion does not matter to professions where a uniform is mandatory) The different options are indifferent to the individual agents. In fashion it is debatable, but for sure, many people wear things because they are in fashion and not because of their own taste. 

The outcome of any action an agent might choose depends on the actions of the other agents. Being in fashion which is the expected outcome depends on the others’ outfits choices. Each agent must choose what to do according to her expectations about what the others will do. 

Fashion decisions are indeed based on individuals’ appraisal of what others will think is in fashion. 

So, fashion looks indeed like an almost perfect example of a coordination problem, like many other social situations, like the use of language (English, French…) to communicate a message, the driving conditions (left or right part of the road), and many other very common collective behaviors where individuals need to coordinate to meet their personal expectations. In such coordination situations, people generally look for an equilibrium, in other words, a combination of individual choices such that no one would have been better off had he alone acted otherwise. 

A problem of coordination occurs when several such equilibria are available: for instance driving on the right or on the left are two equilibria to the driving conditions problem. No one is better than the other. To choose between equilibria and solve coordination problems, individuals must develop social skills, and especially a system of concordant expectations about each other’s actions. Under certain circumstances, solutions to recurrent coordination problems give rise to what the American philosopher David Lewis calls a ‘convention’. 

Does fashion qualify as a set of conventions? It would be really helpful because it would provide us with a more rigorous and formal characterization of fashion and would help us in the understanding of the social role of fashion.

the idea that fashion trends are gratuitous would explain well if fashion is just conventional.

the definition of a convention according to David Lewis. A regularity R in the behavior of members of a population P when they are agents in a recurrent situation S in a convention if and only if, in any instance of S among members of P, the following three conditions hold: A. Everyone conforms to R B. Everyone expects everyone else to conform to R C. Everyone prefers to conform to R on condition that the others do, since S is a coordination problem and uniform conformity to R is a proper coordination equilibrium in S. Basically a convention is generated every time people have no interest in acting one way or another to solve a coordination problem, but rely on past experience that proved successful. This is a perfectly rational behavior that is based on our capacity to anticipate others’ actions and to act accordingly. Is fashion an example of such a behavior? 

Suppose we are wearing beige ties this year, each because the others do. 

tom follows the fashion without knowing he is doing so: when he picks a tie haphazardly, he just happens to pick the beige one. 

Jones is wearing beige ties because he likes the color; but, unknown to him, his tastes are caused by the prevailing fashion and will change with it. 

harry wears a beige tie because he falsely supposes the other beige wearers have discovered some special functional virtue in beige which will benefit him too. 

ben and rick both want to wear whatever color of tie the others will wear; but ben hopes to find occasional non-conformists he can laugh at, whereas rick hopes there will be no nonconformists. 

Out of these five people, 4 of them do not act out of a convention. Who is acting conventionally? I let you 10 seconds to decide… rick is the only one acting conventionally in his choice of a beige tie! 

Let’s review the others. tom acts out of mannerism, he imitates the others’ behaviors, without any conscious decision to do so. Sometimes people just copy other people’s behavior. It probably happens quite often with people dressing without thinking. They follow a trend unconsciously. 

Jones does not copy only others’ behaviors, he copies their preferences too. Jones preference for beige is an unconditional preference: he does not pick beige because he thinks others will pick beige too. Therefore, again, his behavior is not conventional. 

Harry supposes that people wear beige for good reasons, and it is this hypothesis that guides his behavior. His preference for beige is not conditional upon others wearing beige, his preference for beige is based on his hypothesis that beige has some nice practical effects (maybe that it pairs well with everything for instance). 

ben’s preference for beige is a conditional one, but he wears beige only if he thinks some others will not. So his behavior is only partly conventional. Should we infer from this analysis that fashion is not conventional? 

clothing behaviors are not necessarily true coordination problems for everyone: most people imitate others, at least partially, in the way they dress, but it does not mean that their clothing behavior is conditional upon their expectation of others’ clothing behavior. One could object that clothing behavior is not the same as fashion behavior, and that the pure fashion-driven individuals, because they are obsessed with the fashionable character of their dress, are considering any clothing decision as a coordination problem. It is not entirely convincing as we see many examples of conflict games in fashion, where the most fashionable ones are never dressed exactly as the other people of their group.  last but not least, as tempting as it would be to consider fashion as a set of conventions, the ephemeral character of fashion is an argument against its conventional nature, because conventions last long.