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