The Power of Twitter Search

You’ll want to check out
this piece
over at
Less Wrong
on fashion. It’s the clearest thinking I’ve ever seen on the topic. I’ll
summarize (and add my own analysis), which won’t nearly capture the article
itself (so I encourage you to read it yourself, too).

Fashion can be described with a couple of main concepts:

1. The goal of fashion is to elevate one’s status (duh)

2. The rich try to not look like the poor, and the poor try to look like
   the rich–so it’s a chase. Case in point: the rich start wearing a
   certain brand of clothing, and then the poor start doing it. This
   results in nobody rich will ever wearing that brand again because it’s
   associated with copying the rich rather than being rich.

3. Like the peacock, the rich often switch this up by wearing clothes that
   are associated with the lower classes.

Number 3 is the interesting one; just as the peacock is basically saying, “I
can have this big bright thing on me, and here I am dancing for you and
nobody’s messing with me…because I’m a badass.”

The rich are saying something similar by wearing low-class clothing. They’re
saying:

…or, more simply:

Of course, it gets really tricky when the poor start copying that.

Anyway, interesting topic, but I’ve got to find some food. Now if I can just
find my cargo shorts and leather sandals. ::