Getting Dressed by Carrie Yodanis

Getting Dressed by Carrie Yodanis

Author:Carrie Yodanis [Yodanis, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351965989
Google: VrJqDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-10T03:42:03+00:00


11

The Influencers

Imitation doesn’t happen in isolation. Imitation needs a social system that allows and encourages it to exist. Key theories of fashion, which set out to explain change and creativity in fashion, have, in doing so, explained systems that allow and even encourage imitation.1

As discussed earlier, Georg Simmel focused on how the “lower” classes imitate the clothing of the elite classes. But since Simmel, scholars have shown that the rich are at least as likely to imitate the less wealthy as the other way around.2 And other factors, such as age, scholars argue, are now more important than social class in the imitation process. Young people, for example, are believed to be the agents of fashion change as adults imitate what the young wear.3 In the book Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style, a fashion historian suggested that college students initiated the adoption of the casual clothing style that is now widespread in America. “What are you wearing?” she wrote. “Whether it is jeans or sneakers or khakis with a sport coat, chances are college kids made it cool. The modern American wardrobe was born on the college campus.”4

In another famous theory of fashion, Herbert Blumer focused on the role of the influencer in imitation. Blumer emphasized that fashion creates order by establishing a limited number of options, or “suitable models,” for what to wear and thereby creating uniformity among us. The suitable models, Blumer argued, are developed through “collective selection,” which is the process through which only some styles, from the many possible, become what people commonly wear. He said that people with similar circumstances, interactions, and experiences develop similar, collective tastes. But this process itself is not individual, rather involves imitation. In particular, collective selection involves “prestige figures,” “espousing a certain model.” People follow these leaders and the models they espouse. This imitation of leaders leads to a “convergence of choice” to a particular model and a corresponding collective taste. It is not just that certain people share similar lifestyles and thus, similar tastes. Within these lifestyles, there are influencers and there are followers.5

In fashion studies, scales are used to measure who are the “innovators” and who are the “followers.” One scale asks respondents to say how often they try new clothing ideas, wear things from upcoming fashion seasons, and if they are “among the first to try” new styles. According to the scale, doing these things makes you a fashion innovator, someone who is among the first to wear new styles of clothing. Then, respondents are asked if they influence the clothes their friends buy, if people turn to them for fashion advice, and if people consider them to “a good source” for fashion advice. Doing these things makes you, according to the scale, a fashion leader, someone who influences what other people wear.6

In studies of university students, about 8–15% of the students who answered the questions were fashion innovators, 6–7% were leaders, and about 7–8% were both innovators and leaders. In comparison, the majority, 70–78%, of the students were neither leaders nor innovators, and instead were fashion followers.



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