Why Do Clothes Go Out of Fashion?
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Why read this
It is almost too obvious to say that it is worth knowing why we do what we do — and notice how many hedges we just wrapped around that claim, most of them unnecessary. If you'll grant us the premise, you might enjoy joining us on a tour through some of the thinking that has tried to explain fashion: anthropological, sociological, historical, philosophical, psychological and a good deal besides.
What follows is a set of ideas about how trends have evolved — useful background for understanding where today's debates came from. The question concerns all of us, because we all wear, care for, choose, look at and think about clothes, and many of us take a position on them, aesthetic or ethical. So let's take a few perspectives in turn.
Here is a strange fact about clothes. They rarely stop working. A coat that fitted last winter still fits; the seams hold, the fabric is sound. And yet every year a great many perfectly functional garments are quietly retired, not because they failed but because they stopped feeling right.
Almost nothing else in material culture behaves this way. We do not replace a working chair because chairs have moved on. So why does dress drift, endlessly, and who exactly is doing the pushing? People have been arguing about that for well over a century, and the answers turn out to say a great deal about us.
Why we dress at all
The most useful starting point is still a book from 1930. In The Psychology of Clothes, the psychoanalyst J. C. Flügel proposed that dress serves three purposes at once, and that they pull against one another: adornment, modesty and protection.
His most quietly radical claim concerned the order of those. Anthropology, he noted, records peoples who do not dress, but none who do not adorn. Decoration comes before covering. Which means the wardrobe is not fundamentally a solution to weather (at least, not in most places); it is a display technology that later took on other jobs.
Flügel also caught something that seems obvious once said: clothing extends the body. It enlarges our apparent size, occupies more space, lends the wearer a sense of greater physical presence — and we attribute that enlarged outline to the person rather than to the cloth. A garment is not something we carry. It becomes, mentally, part of us. Everything that follows is a consequence of that fusion.
The first engine: distinction
If dress is display, the obvious question is: display to whom, and against whom? The earliest systematic answer was economic. In 1899 Thorstein Veblen described conspicuous consumption — goods bought less for use than to broadcast the wealth and leisure behind them.
Five years later the sociologist Georg Simmel turned that into a mechanism, and it is a very elegant account of drift. That doesn't mean the mechanism explains everything about how trends move, but it does show one of the forces at work. Fashion, he argued, satisfies two opposite needs at once: the need to belong and the need to stand apart. An elite adopts a style to differentiate itself; those below imitate it to claim the same standing; and the moment imitation succeeds, the style has lost precisely the value that made it desirable. So the elite moves on — and the economic elite, besides being a class some people aspire to in some periods, has the means to commission the luxury goods that mark it out.
The consequence is built into the machine. In this way, a fashion is destroyed by its own success, which condemns it to permanent self-renewal.
Simmel’s loop: a style is destroyed by the very thing that made it desirable.
The second engine: desire, and where it lands
Flügel's psychoanalytic frame produced a stranger idea, developed most famously by the costume historian James Laver in the same decade. Laver proposed that emphasis in women's dress migrates from one part of the body to another — shoulders, then legs, then waist — and that a zone loses its charge once overexposed, forcing the emphasis elsewhere. It is, he wrote, “the business of fashion to pursue it, without ever actually catching up”.
Laver also left a half-joking timeline of taste that has proved uncomfortably durable: the same garment is indecent ten years before its moment, daring one year before, smart in its year, dowdy a year after, hideous a decade later — and charming a century on. Nothing about the object changes. Only its distance from now — its cultural context.
Yet, interesting as these reflections on desire and dress are, both ideas have aged badly in one specific way, and it is worth saying so. They explain women's dress by sexual signalling and men's by status, which reduces half the population to an object of the gaze (a problem that persists, and that has a name: patriarchy). Feminist scholarship has pushed back hard since the 1980s — Elizabeth Wilson and later Joanne Entwistle argued that dress is a situated bodily practice, something we do rather than a code we transmit, and that self-expression, comfort and social competence explain far more than seduction does.
The gendered split, and who got left with ‘fashion’
Flügel's most cited phrase is the Great Masculine Renunciation: the moment around the end of the eighteenth century when European men abandoned colour, ornament and display for the sober, standardised suit — trading beauty for utility, and decoration for the appearance of seriousness.
Recent scholarship has complicated it usefully. Writing in Fashion Theory in 2021, Alexandra Chapin argued that the deeper consequence was not what happened to men at all: it was that ‘fashion’ itself — changeability, frivolity, being looked at — was reassigned to women, when it had previously belonged to both sexes of the upper class. The renunciation did not remove men from fashion so much as it made fashion feminine, and therefore easy to dismiss.
That is the classical account: elegant, enormously influential, and — as the next generation of researchers discovered — wrong in one important respect. It assumes the movement starts at the top. In the second part of this piece we look at what replaced it, at why we keep following even when nobody is leading, and at what happened when the whole cycle sped up to a matter of weeks.
