The End of Fashion

The impudent McQueen liked to shock the French establishment, such as the time he told Le Monde that handmade couture embroidery looks “like vomit.”

French designer clothes in general were too contrived, too uptight, or just too weird looking. “

Women want attractive clothes that function in the real world, “not something that is impossible to walk and drive in. You know, clothes that fit into your life.”

Marketing analysts describe consumers’ new embrace of the most functional and affordable clothes as the “commoditization” of fashion.

That evening, Shaffer was feeling quite satisfied with her budget find. “I got more10 compliments on the shoes than my dress,” she recalled, noting that her friends were “impressed when I told them they came from Kmart.”

People’s values changed with regard to fashion. Most people used to put “fashion” on a pedestal. There was a sharp delineation between ordinary clothes from Casual Corner and Sears and true “fashion” from Paris couturiers and boutiques like Charivari and Martha.

People stopped dressing up. By the end of the 1980s, most Americans were wedded to jeans, loose knit tops, and Nike shoes, which became the acceptable standard of everyday dress even in offices. Leading the charge for informality were men, in their rejection of the business suit, which since the start of the industrial age had been the symbol of masculine authority and the uniform of the corporate workplace.

The power now belongs to us, the consumers, who decide what we want to wear, when we buy it, and how much we pay for it. And nowadays, consumers are a lot savvier and more skeptical when it comes to fashion.

Every few years, when the silhouettes change, women and men have been compelled to go shopping and to rebuild their wardrobes to stay in style.

Yet fashion, by definition, is ephemeral and elusive, a target that keeps moving. A clothing style becomes fashionable when enough people accept it at any given time. And conversely, fashions go out of style when people quit wearing them.