Style, Fashion, Trends and Fads

India statistic of the day:
Number of parliament members: 545
Number who have been indicted: 100
--Edward Luce, from In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India.

Quote of the day:
“I have been a clinician for over 30 years, and a researcher, and I think spanking, by and large, is an adult temper tantrum. I’ve never quite understood how you’re going to help your children manage their impulses by losing control of yours.”
--Kyle Pruett, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center. He was responding to California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber’s bill to prohibit spanking of children under age 4.

Quote of the day no. 2:
“We all develop our personal styles by noticing what people like about us, and exaggerating it.”
--Peter Schjeldahl in the January 29th "New Yorker."

Style, fashion, trends and fads. Each of these terms has a distinct meaning, yet we often confuse them or squash two or three of them together to make a point.

Each of us has a style, whether it’s appealing or unappealing. As Schjeldahl says, we find something about ourselves that gets a rise out of people, and we do more of that, or wear more of that, and it becomes a personal style. If we proclaim we have no personal style, that proclamation describes the non-style that is our style.

Fashion is an attempt to group similar styles into common categories and put a label on it and maybe sell into it. Clothing fashion designers are especially sensitive to what people like, or probably will like, and they create clothing according to these likes.

A trend is a repeating event or behavior over some significant period of time. True trends in just about anything are fascinating to study. But the caveat here is that real trends are very hard to spot. We love to pronounce trends on the basis of our enthusiasm over one or two things we have seen, and these pronouncements can be very entertaining. But they are rarely accurate. Indeed, even experts usually get trends very wrong. See my post "Trend, We Hardly Knew Ye."

A fad is something that there is some excitement about, and it appears quickly and disappears just as quickly. Examples of fads: the Macarena, Aunt Mabel as a day trader, gatoring, buying and flipping the house next door, disco, $15 pomegranate martinis, having lots of tattoos, painting each room a different bright color, saying “far out,” carrying a mouse-sized dog in your purse, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” “Deal or No Deal,” and 15 different TV series about forensics.

Many times we jump into fads in a search for belonging or excitement, or in an attempt to make a lot of money (see the near-daily full page newspaper ads proclaiming “how I make $20,000 a month in my eBay business, and you can, too!”).

Fads come and go, but style goes on and on. Some great things today were great 50 years ago and will be great 50 years from now. Knowing what these things are makes life delicious.