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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: What do you think "fashion" is? I used to think there were some very cool, fashion-adept people, who have the ability to predict what will considered modern next year.

The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance. It's not like they produce everything and public opinion decides in the end what is "cool". Granted, the industry tries to predict what will be in demand. But by and large, fashion is not predicting what will be cool, but specifing what will be produced.

When they say "blue will be in fashion next year", then it means you'll be able to buy a lot of blue clothes (and some people will be able to deduce that you have not recently bought clothes, which is a bonus to encourage more buying).

I only realized this a I got older, when certain items were missing in every shop, that were there the previous and following years. Be it a certain cut of jeans or a certain colored shirt. (And it's not just clothes, I noticed it in interior design, PC cases, salad sauces, and just about any product category.)

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>The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance.

It's more the mainstream you're referring to, late adopters basically. of course they can produce in advance as the styles are already validated on urban streets and within subcultures who really set the trends.

There are inventors, early adopters and late adopters, quite similar to SaaS.

That's the party line, but it's just some sub-cultures, teens and troubled personalities that "express themselves" through fashion (the most shallow thing you can do, a juvenile thing in any case), the "early adopters", and then a huge industry copying them at various levels and with various delays. On top of that, there are also top-level mandates "this year let's push yellow strayjackets" or whatever.

This results in a huge industry, selling junk people don't need, which are enviromentally harmful, with the ludicrous insistence that the clothes you bought last season are not good anymore because "fashion".

Fashion is basically part of a real world interface for the social groups you interact with, a way to tweak the first impression. It's only junk for you as an outsider not understanding the social groups of insiders dressing a certain way.

It's valuable and sells because social ladders are everywhere, we're all apes to a degree. It's not a suprise that the epic centers are urban melting pots with a higher population density and more "troubled people".

>Fashion is basically part of a real world interface for the social groups you interact with, a way to tweak the first impression.

Yes. But it's a shallow real world interface, for shallow groups and facile identities, mostly used to associate with teenagers and juvenile group forming.

I dont say it's not a thing, or don't have a use. I say the use is bad.

This is rediculous. Just a few years ago there was an article about silicon valley casual fashion being challenging for minorities who grew up outside the bubble and were taught to dress their best in a work suit or similar. The LGBT is huge on visual signals of allegiance. Popular brands are built 80% on what their brand signals and not on their build quality. There are countless examples of clothing being used to signal elements of personal identity but for some reason you seem to consider this 'fascile' because our wardrobes aren't full-on biographies of personality.

You’re expressing your opinion as if it’s a cold hard truth.

Which part? That fashion/clothing industry is not the leading cause of pollution in the world (aka. bad ecologically)?

>> Fashion is basically part of a real world interface for the social groups you interact with, a way to tweak the first impression. It's only junk for you as an outsider not understanding the social groups of insiders dressing a certain way.

I've seen former peers and fellow students borrow and become indebted to become part of the group this way. Great if the subject can afford it, not so much if the subject is now enslaved to debt or is misallocating funds. Then, perhaps find more welcoming social groups?

Any culture group that expresses itself through expensive clothes will find another expensive way to show group membership if clothes aren't an option. Other subcultures (think grunge, or tech people) either use cheap mismatched charity-shop styles or use other signals (e.g. running Linux at home).

This is so true! If the definition of fashion is extended to also include the latest smartphones, laptops, or service memberships. I never thought of it this way, but makes a lot of sense.

Maybe both?

There are social ladders, and there are people using social ladders to sell clothes they started working on last year?

> it's just some sub-cultures, teens and troubled personalities that "express themselves" through fashion (the most shallow thing you can do, a juvenile thing in any case)

Are you claiming that dressing to express yourself is shallow and juvenile?

Do you just...buy the first thing you see at Goodwill that fits you? I'm not sure how one could avoid dressing to express oneself, to at least some degree, unless you exclusively wear work uniforms or hand-me-downs.

> I'm not sure how one could avoid dressing to express oneself, to at least some degree, unless you exclusively wear work uniforms or hand-me-downs.

Exclusively wearing work uniforms (outside of work) or hand-me-downs is still, in its own way, expressing oneself. One way or another you make a personal decision on how to dress and whether to follow a particular style, trend, price point, etc. and that reflects something about you.

> but it's just some sub-cultures, teens and troubled personalities that "express themselves" through fashion

Like, really?

My dad mostly wears tough leather boots, flannel shirts and aged jeans. It's all old, proven, and tough. He's a heavy outdoors enthusiast, into kayaking motorbiking and camping, and his clothing style fits this perfectly.

My brother is a big rugby player. He prefers a much more casual look, with rugby shirts, trainers, shorts if the weather allows, and a baseball cap (not often seen in rural England!).

We all express ourselves through clothing, whether you do so consciously or not. Even picking clothes that say "I don't care about fashion" is expressing yourself. We're social creates, and there's no getting away from that.

This is such a weird cynical take on fashion I don't even know where to begin...

It says a lot about parent posters close mindedness and lack of imagination, as well as their shallowness for judging people based on their fashion choices

> The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance.

And they guess wrong all the time. If they could actually control things, they wouldn't have so much unsold inventory.

They're making predictions based on heuristics, not magically controlling the masses.

There is surprisingly little unsold inventory, outlets are selling cheaper versions of clothes not unsold inventory. Of course not every design or brand succeeds, but the industry as a whole is reasonably efficient.

It's really not that simple.

Fashion is an industry where hundreds of individual designers, some with the backing of megacorps and some without, try to meet popular interest (or to lead it), with production times measured in weeks to months, and with seasonal variation.

There is no "fashion cabal" where designers get together for drinks and to anoint "cerulean blue" as the color of 2023 and then pull their customers by the nose ring into purchasing.

(Yes, there is a media-favorite color survey that gets printed every year, and there are some downstream effects of that).

The music industry works similarly. Bands toil for years (or months), doing their thing, and A&R reps from major labels try to predict what they can promote that will be popular enough this year (based on the choices of other promoters in the industry), or next year, to sell in the near term, and yet differentiated enough to have lasting value.

The snack food industry works similarly.

The software industry works similarly.

The political industry works similarly.

> There is no "fashion cabal" where designers get together for drinks and to anoint "cerulean blue" as the color of 2023 and then pull their customers by the nose ring into purchasing.

"Twice a year Pantone hosts, in a European capital, a secret meeting of representatives from various nations' color standards groups. After two days of presentations and debate, they choose a color for the following year."

"OVER 20 YEARS OF INFLUENCING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND PURCHASING DECISIONS"

https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-archive

Not that I'm paying much attention to these things, but I've not seen much to support that "ultimate grey" and "Illuminating" yellow are the dominating colors this year? (https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2021)

It takes a few cycles to hit if you're not on the forefront of fashion. But perhaps you can see how the colors from a few years back have come and gone even among fashion 'normies'?

https://www.pantone.com/articles/color-of-the-year/color-of-...

http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/macos-cat...

HA! The same colors I tend to see in hipster software design and vaporwave music from that era.

Cars in my neighborhood have started popping up that are painted it what appears to be primer with a coating.

I was kind of wondering why that was suddenly a thing. I don't know if that was somehow directly or indirectly motivated by pantone, but it certainly has been a headscratcher for me for some time and this could answer why that is happening.

Pantone was the reference intended by my parenthetical.

There are some downstream effects, but they are overwhelmingly not relevant to fashion design, no matter what their marketing material claims.

And, amazingly, in the year 2000, the color they chose was cerulean blue.

That is exactly why I chose that example. It was the last one I remembered.

Pantone sells color chips. They are not designers, and they do not make or sell fashion.

The color of the year is just a marketing stunt which the media laps up, but the fashion industry completely ignores.

Is the cerulean scene from The Devil Wears Prada based somewhere in reality then?

Wow... this is maybe the best counterpoint I've ever seen on HN.

Did you buy anything this year in response to Pantone's color of the year?

Well since it's not a direct response advertising campaign, of course no one buys anything "in response to" it.

I did repaint my bedroom with an accent wall that's just about the exact shade of blue that is their 2020 color of the year. Not because Pantone told me to, but maybe because their selection of that color led it to be more prominently placed/advertised when I started picking new paint colors.

Tough to say, and your question is too oversimplistic to make sense as part of the discussion.

There was a great article years back, on oped by guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani about the death of Shred music.

In short: the way trends work is they get popular and then all the people already doing that thing get popular too.

There is during that time people who jump on the bandwagon. Once the popularity dies off, lots of people keep doing that thing, it just doesn't get the notoriety it did before: it returns to its niche.

I’d say this is a more nuanced and sophisticated explanation of the same dynamic the person you’re responding to is getting at. Yes there is no “cabal” as in a smoke-filled room where shadowy figures make the decision. But, in practice, the net effect is that of a large genetic algorithm settling on an approved trend that it then uses its market power to push people towards.

And, of course, the more the industry is consolidated the more “directed” it will seem.

Color Marketing Group's whole business is proposing new color palettes to embody the anticipated zeitgeist. Behold their dreamlike prose:

"Color Marketing Group’s North America 2022 Key Color, New Day, is the color response for a time still in transition. New Day suggests confidence and familiarity to greet 2022 with a sense of comfort.

"A light, fresh blue with red influences, New Day is an inspiring color designed to convey the classic connotation of hope and new beginnings. …

"As calming as New Day may appear, its red undertone is a stimulation aspect of the color, making it ideal for practically any product application. From commercial to residential spaces, consumer goods to fashion, and graphic design, New Day is a color that stands for truth and hope."

https://colormarketing.org/2020/11/20/key-color-new-day/

When they say "blue will be in fashion next year"

"They" being the Color Association of the United States.[1] Which had a lot more clout when the US made its own textiles.

They also used to manage the consumer electronics color cycle, from grey to black to white to colors to putty and back to grey again.

[1] https://www.colorassociation.com/

I've been wearing the exact same jeans cut for 30 years now. When they get holes, I just push a button on Amazon for more. My dress shirts are 20-30 years old. They're not out of style.

Of course, I've never been cool, so there's that.

> My dress shirts are 20-30 years old. They're not out of style.

They are, you just don't care. Which is OK.

Eh, you can pick plain white or blue button-up shirts with one of a few normal collar types and you won't be trendy but you also won't be "out of style". There are also some approaches to fashion the point of which is (at least in part) that they change only very slowly ("prep", for instance, which is practically defined by that quality—certain very casual styles like country/cowboy might also qualify, they have trends but you can definitely avoid them and achieve a look that's as close to timeless as it gets, on human-lifespan timescales).

Suits are slowly evolving fewer buttons but you're probably still OK with a 3-button in most contexts, and a 2 or 3-roll-2 is probably future-safe for 15 years at least. Suits may well be almost gone by the time they're out of fashion, really, and will only remain in contexts that don't really evolve (the 3-button is firmly OK in a legal, funeral, or wedding context, for instance, and likely to remain so pretty much indefinitely, provided, in the latter case, it's not an extremely formal wedding and/or you're not in the wedding party itself)

You're right that I don't care, but if you saw a photo of me in one you couldn't tell what decade it is from.

Classics never go out of style.

I'm kind of in the same boat. I never cared about fashion much. It always seemed hollow and vapid to me. Even as a kid/teen-ager/20s when it's supposed to matter the most.

Perhaps your circle of friends didn't care either.

For kids/teenagers/early-20s, what matters is belonging - observable patterns of behavior that follow are whatever gets amplified when everyone looks at everyone else in their vicinity for signals of approval.

FWIW, I also didn't care about fashion, and neither did my friends. I expect this to be the case with quite a lot of HNers - this comes from being a nerd and having nerd friends. We amplified each other on different patterns of behavior.

This isn’t an accurate take.

Fashion trends are created in the same way art, architecture, and music trends are. By people who are talented and come to be influential.

The fashion “industry” is the very last stop in the process. The trends are determined by the “cool kids” for the most part.

If you don’t have exposure to the communities that actually drive trends it might feel the way you describe but if you live in a place like New York or pay attention to certain media the dynamic is obvious. If you’re basing your read on what you see in the local shop you’re fully a year or more behind the curve.

Which is fine. You don’t have to care about it at all really. But the your description of the dynamic isn’t correct.

Yeah, it’s a complex system like economics. It often has to do with things like immigration and cultural fusion in influential neighbourhoods. Musicians or break out visual artists chasing an career and bringing their style to London or NYC.

More subtly a smaller but far more interested proportion of the population tries more experimental things and the big shops just copy that. That's both cheaper for the buyer and the producer.

It's the same for tech, various gadgets or technologies that are hyped right now have been gathering traction since years but have been picked up by the big brands only very recently. Best example is the trend of using non-x86 Computers, a few desktop/laptop projects have been there including Chrome books. Now Apple picked it up and it's a completely normal thing to buy an ARM laptop.

Looks kind of planned but it's not. It's just that some things fall out of fashion for whatever reasons...

>Looks kind of planned but it's not. It's just that some things fall out of fashion for whatever reasons...

"Not planned? Whatever reason?" There are huge billion dollar campaigns for what things "are in fashion" this season. For starters, the thousands of ads by fashion brands with the same "current fashion" messaging.

Without that, the majority of the population could not care less what some "small proportion" of idiots consider "experimental/cool/etc". Sub-culture fashion would stay with the subculture (like most of it does, unless it's picked up by the mass fashion industry and promoted to hell).

It's the endless branding, messaging, adverting, PR, articles, etc, that get Joe/Jane Average buying into this season's fasion.

The people chasing "this season's fashion" are rather niche. People care less and less about this stuff as they get older. We also work in an industry where free conference t-shirts and khaki shorts are perfectly acceptable work attire. It's been over 100 years since blue jeans were invented and they're still quite popular.

And if some people get enjoyment out of trying out new fashion styles, who am I to judge? No different than me buying the latest video game or checking out the newest programming language or listening to new releases of music.

>The people chasing "this season's fashion" are rather niche.

The people who consciously chace "this season's fashion" are niche [1].

But even more so, people who are bombarded with messages to buy new clothes, and that this style is now obsolete, get this instead, are pretty much everybody though.

[1] Though not that small of a niche: a big percentage of women do it quite a lot (as evident by the success of that side of the fashion industry and peripheral industries like accessories, perfumes, cosmetics, and such), and men have increasingly being doing it ever since the 80s too, especially if we include things like sneakers and so on).

As someone wrote, it's not like 250 million Americans, men and women, each individually by themselves, decided bell-bottoms are a good idea some year in the 70s...

You could say that of rock and roll too couldn't you? Or disco? Or 80s rap? Or hipster coffee shops? Or Atari video games?

Like, of course we have waves and trends of various things that take hold of popular imagination for some time. Trends start as some niche then people see it taking off and jump on the bandwagon. Sometimes it sweeps the whole country or an entire culture. But it's fun and people get enjoyment from it. And it gives us a common cultural framework to relate to each other with even across vast distances.

Was there no trend you ever participated in that you look back on today and smile about?

But who produces that experimental clothing in the first place?

>The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance.

That's fast fashion. It's neither elegant not particularly valued by people who are into fashion.

No, it's the companies who show at PFW and places like that which need 6-12 months. Zara can do it in 14 days.

There are cool people with the seemingly uncanny ability to predict fashion, but it's a bit of a trick. They do something that's different and can be monetized, and the industry grabs on to that and tries to push it as The Next Big Thing, through advertising, magazine contacts and social media influencers. Meanwhile, the production lines are running full-tilt so they can have the clothes in stores for when the right level of desire/FOMO has been built up.

At that point, the cutting edge fashionable people are already on to the next thing, and the cycle continues.

Since it's impossible for ordinary people without industry contacts to be ahead of the curve, do you try to follow the fashion trends, knowing that you'll always be at least a half step behind?

Or do you stick with tried and true stalwarts, such as slim-to-regular cut dark denim jeans, Oxford shirts, sports jackets and so on, never being super fashionable, but also certainly not sartorially hopeless?

Trends are almost always pushed or at least encouraged by financial interests.

> It's not like they produce everything and public opinion decides in the end what is "cool".

To the contrary, public opinion does decide. Brands are trying to guess what will sell and be in fashion, and produce that. But they get it wrong all the time, as sales plummet for a particular season collection because consumers don't like it but really like another designer who guessed better.

The fashion industry isn't monolithic. There isn't one person deciding what gets produced. Ultimately it is all consumer-led as brands compete to try to produce what people will buy -- and they know fashion-conscious people don't want to buy what was for sale the previous year. But individual brands get tastes wrong all the time -- even well-known brands have seasons where they just totally mess up.

I've gone through probably 300 slide decks from various industries that explicitly state that 'consumers in x demographic sector will need to be re-educated about the value of [something they didn't want]'.

I've seen it in regards to premium breads, in-app purchases, crude oil solvent levels, public infrastructure features, clothing, etc. This isn't a new thing. Sometimes you just spend money to fabricate culture when it isn't on your side.

>There isn't one person deciding what gets produced.

Is this really an appropriate standard for examining whether or not an organization can push culture rather than merely adapt to it?

Well sure every company is trying to convince customers their thing is best. That's just marketing.

But different companies can be trying to convince things that are totally opposed to each other too. It's still not monolithic. (Regardless of whether it's "one person" or not, it was just an illustration.)

At the end of the day it's still customers buying what they like from a range of companies that are all competing with each other, some succeeding and some failing.

Not really. All companies that make bags may be pulling consumers in different directions with respect to which style of bags they should purchase, but all will pull in the direction of "purchase bags".

You can zoom out from bags to fashion, and the same idea repeats itself.

Consumer consumption itself is the unified cultural zeitgeist. That's the issue - in some areas it'll spur innovation, but in others it is an obviously wasteful use of limited resources and time.

I think you're having a different conversation?

I was arguing that fashion trends are ultimately driven by consumers, not by companies (as GP was arguing). Consumers aren't blindly buying whatever's for sale.

Whether people are purchasing more than they need, or whether that's wasteful, is a totally orthogonal conversation.

But pretty sure most women need bags. And a lot of guys use backpacks too. They're not some artificial need invented by companies.

> Consumers aren't blindly buying whatever's for sale.

But of course they are. This is the case not just in fashion, but pretty much everywhere (and particularly visible wrt. hardware and software). Consumers are given a bit of a choice to get completely confused by it, but ultimately they pick something from what's for sale. They can't just go and say, "I want these trousers, except cut like these other ones, and with the color from that dress" - much like they can't go and say "I want a phone like this new iPhone, but with my damn headphone jack back". Not without spending 1-2 orders of magnitude more money.

What this means for our discussion is, it's vendors who set the trends, because they choose what is available for purchase at scale.

You're missing the point which is that vendors are making the products they think people will buy.

Vendors aren't arbitrarily setting "trends", they aren't inventing things in a vacuum.

They literally do market research, interview consumers, figure out what people want, and then try to give that to them.

Of course any single individual doesn't always get exactly what they want (the pair of pants, the phone but with a headphone jack), but collectively we do trend strongly towards that. Manufacturers aren't perfect, they don't always get it maximally correct, but they're generally trying their best, because, you know, competition.

>Vendors aren't arbitrarily setting "trends"

You're right in that trends aren't arbitrary, but you've jumped from that idea to the idea that consumer needs are the reason. That's not the case. A large proportion of the time the reason why a particular trend is set isn't 'consumers want this'. It's 'the commodities to make this product are going to be particularly cheap this season - so margins should be healthy'. The McRib is a great example.

As a crystal clear example, do you think any consumer in their right mind wants their products shrinkflated? Do you think misleading packaging is based on satisfying consumer desires, or manipulating them?

The competition is for dollars, not for goodwill.

Yes and no. People can pick out vintage and older stuff and mix it up.

Also you should look up Zara and fast fashion.

You might find this interesting: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-...

Imo the real fashion trendsetters don’t think about it in terms of what might become trending to surf it like q wave but are focussed on ideas&concepts which are relevant for society in that year/age.

The isnt entirely true. clothing companies mimic what was on the runway a season before and mass produce it for consumer consumption

Even an emergent intelligence is different from top down dictate.

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