By
Lisa Gan
The notion that trends in fashion take part in a phenomenon known
as the trickle down effect has long been recognised by fashion pundits.
A process of social emulation of society's upper echelons by the
subordinates provides myriad incentives for perpetual and incessant
changes in fashion through a sequence of novelty and imitation. Dior's
'New Look' of 1947 consisted of creations that were only affordable to a
minority of affluent women of the time. Fashion was governed by
haute-couture designers and presented to the masses to aspire toward.
However, this traditional prospective has been vigorously challenged by
many throughout the fashion world. Revisionist observations have
introduced a paradoxical argument that fashion trends have, on numerous
occasions, inadvertently emerged from the more obscure spheres of
society onto the glamorous catwalks of high-fashion designers.
These
styles can originate from a range of unorthodox sources, from
leather-jacketed punks and dramatic Goths, the teddy boys of the 1950s,
to ethnic minority cultures from all edges of the globe. Styles that
emerge from the bottom of the social hierarchy are increasingly bubbling
up to become the status of high fashion. There has been significant
concern over the implications of this so-called bubble-up effect, such
as the ambiguity between the notions of flattering imitation and
outright exploitation of subcultures and minority groups.
Democratization and globalisation of fashion has contributed to the
abrasion of the authenticity and original identity of street-style
culture. The inadvertent massification of maverick ideas undermines the
'street value' of the fashions for the very people who originally
created them.
The underlying definition of subculture, with
regards to anthropology and sociology, is a group of people who
differentiates from the larger prevailing culture surrounding them.
Members of a subculture have their own shared values and conventions,
tending to oppose mainstream culture, for example in fashion and music
tastes. Gelder proposed several principal characteristics that
subcultures portrayed in general: negative relations to work and class,
association with their own territory, living in non-domestic habitats,
profligate sense of stylistic exaggeration, and stubborn refusal of
massification. Hebdige emphasised that the opposition by subcultures to
conform to standard societal values has been slated as a negative trait,
where in fact the misunderstood groups are only attempting to find
their own identity and meaning. The divergence away from social normalcy
has unsurprisingly proliferated new ideas and styles, and this can be
distinctly observed through the existence of fashion diversity.
Ethnicity, race, class and gender can be physical distinctions of
subcultures. Furthermore, qualities which determine a subculture may be
aesthetic, linguistic, sexual, political, religious, or a mixture of
these factors.
Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays
investigated the drivers of social control and the engineering of
consent. Their psychological theories provide insight into the causes of
deviation, by members of a subculture, from social norms. They
highlighted the irrationality of human beings and discovered that by
tapping into their deepest desires, it is possible to manipulate
unconscious minds in order to manage society. Freud believed that
stimulating the unconscious was crucial to creating desire, and
therefore is conducive to economic progress and mass democracy. Bernays
argued that individual freedom was unattainable because it would be "too
dangerous to allow human beings to truly express themselves". Through
various methods of advertising, a distinctive 'majority' can be created
in society, where a person belonging to this group is perceived to be
normal, conventional and conformist. By using techniques to satisfy
people's inner desires, the rise of widespread consumerism plays a part
in the organized manipulation of the masses. However, through the
unleashing of certain uncontrolled aggressive instincts, occasional
irrationality emerged in groups, and this repudiation of the banalities
of ordinary life is believed to be a key factor in the generation of
subcultures.
The expansion of youth styles from subcultures into
the fashion market is a real network or infrastructure of new kinds of
commercial and economic institutions. The creation of new and startling
styles will be inextricably linked to a process of production and
publicity inevitably leading to the diffusion and spread of the
subversive subculture trends. For example, both mod and punk innovations
have become incorporated into high and mainstream fashion after the
initial low-key emergence of such styles. The complexities of society
perpetuate continuous change in style and taste, with different classes
or groups prevailing during certain periods of time. To deal with the
question of which is the most influential source of fashion, it is
necessary to consider distribution of power. It is not the same for all
classes to have access to the means by which ideas are disseminated in
our society, principally the mass media. In history, the elites have had
greater power to prescribe meaning and dictate what is to be defined as
normality.
Trickling down to shape the views of the substantial
passive parts of the population, designers from high places were able to
set trends that diffused from the upper to lower spectrum of society.
Subcultures, it was suggested, go against nature and are subject to
abhorrence and disapproval by followers of mainstream trends.
Regrettably, criminal gangs, homeless subcultures and reckless
skateboarders, among other 'negative' portrayals of subcultures have
been accused of dragging down the image of other 'positive' subcultures
which demonstrate creativity and inspiration. There is an unstable
relationship between socialising and de-socialising forces.
Nevertheless, German philosopher Kant observed that actual social life
should and always will consist of in some way its own opposite asocial
life, which he described as "unsociable sociality".
Without doubt,
fashion exhibits a dichotomy of conformity and differentiation, with
contradictory groups aspiring to fit in and stand out from a crowd.
Previously, the pace of change that fashion went through has spawned
social emulation, a phenomenon whereby subordinate groups follow a
process of imitation of the fashion tastes adopted by the upper echelons
of society. Veblen, a Norwegian-American sociologist and economist,
criticized in detail the rise of consumerism, especially the notion of
conspicuous consumption, initiated by people of high status. Another
influential sociologist Georg Simmel, classified two basic human
instincts - the impetus to imitate one's neighbours, and conversely, the
individualistic behaviour of distinguishing oneself.
Simmel
indicated the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for
individual differentiation and change. Indeed, to elucidate Simmel's
theory of distinction versus imitation, the distinctiveness of
subcultures in the early stages of a set fashion assures for its
destruction as the fashion spreads. An idea or a custom has its optimal
innovative intensity when it is constrained to a small clandestine
group. After the original symbolic value of the idea has been exploited
by commercialisation and accepted as a part of mass culture, the balance
will have a tendency to tip towards imitation over distinction. An
example of the imitation of a distinctive subculture is the evolution of
blue jeans, which originating from humble American cowboys and
gold-miners, demonstrate a bubble-up effect of a subculture. On a larger
scale, it can be said that Western style dressing 'bubbled-up' from
19th Century Quaker's attire, rather than 'trickling down' from the
styles of Court aristocracy.
Simmel describes fashion as a process
by which the society consolidates itself by reintegrating what disrupts
it. The existence of fashion requires that some members of society must
be perceived as superior or inferior. From economist Harvey
Leibenstein's perspective, fashion is a market constituted of 'snobs'.
The phenomenon of 'snob-demand' depicts consumers as snobs who will stop
buying a product when the price drops too much. The trickle down effect
has been related to a 'band-wagon effect' where the turnovers of a
product are particularly high as a result of imitation. Every economic
choice is bound not only to the pure computational rationality of
individuals, but is influenced by irrational factors, such social
imitation, contrary to what Simmel calls the 'need for distinction'.
However, a 'reverse bandwagon effect' acts as an opposing force when a
snobbish consumer stops buying a product because too many others are
buying it as well. The resultant force depends on the relative intensity
of the two forces.
Subcultures have often endured a less than
agreeable relationship with the mainstream as a result of exploitation
and cultural appropriation. This often leads to the demise or evolution
of a particular subculture once the originally novel ideas have been
commercially popularised to an extent where the ideologies of the
subculture have lost their fundamental connotations. The insatiable
commercial hunger for new trends instigated the counterfeiting of
subculture fashion, unjustifiably used on the sophisticated catwalks in
fashion dictatorships of Paris, Milan and New York. It is not purely
sartorial fashion but also music subcultures that are particularly
vulnerable to the massification process. Certain types of music like
jazz, punk, hip hop and rave were only listened to by minority groups at
the initial stages of its history.
Events in history have had
substantial impacts on the rise, development and evolution of
subcultures. The First World War had an impact on men's hairstyles as
lice and fleas were ubiquitous in wartime trenches. Those with shaved
heads were presumed to have served at the Front while those with long
hair were branded cowards, deserters, and pacifists. During the 1920s,
standard social etiquettes were discarded by certain youth subcultures,
as drink, drugs and jazz infiltrated America, intensified by the alcohol
prohibition of the time. A crime subculture emerged as smugglers
discovered profit opportunities with Mexican and Cuban drug plantations.
The Great Depression of the late 20s in North America caused pervasive
poverty and unemployment. Consequently, a significant number of
adolescents discovered identity and expression through urban youth
gangs, such as the 'dead end kids'.
Existentialists like Camus and
Sartre also played a significant part in influencing the subcultures of
the 1950s and 60s. Emphasis on freedom of the individual created a
version of existential bohemianism resembling the beat generation. This
subculture represented a version of bohemian hedonism; McClure declares
that "non-conformity and spontaneous creativity were crucial". In
literature, Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" depicted the economic
hardship of these times. Initially burned and banned to American
citizens, condemned as communist propaganda, this book was given the
Nobel Prize for literature in 1962. It only took a few decades for the
previously socially unacceptable book to diffuse into mainstream
culture.
The popularisation of folk and cowboy songs led to their
unique underlying patterns being mixed with elements of jazz, blues and
soul, creating a new subculture of western swing. Technological progress
facilitated "instantaneous mass media creating large subcultures from
the ideas of a range of smaller subcultures". Accordingly, a bubble-up
effect can be seen where, through a process of innovation and diffusion,
original ideas can spread into mass culture.
The process of
integration has a potential to lead to the polarisation of warring
subcultures, contributing to social disorganization. Shaw and Mckay
assessed that although their data is not sufficient to determine "the
extent to which membership in delinquent gangs produces delinquency",
membership is probably a contributing factor. They use the term
'differential social organisation' to depict how subculture formation is
a result of broader economic and demographic forces that undermine
conventional local institutions of control.
The institution of the
family is weakened by these forces, and as a result, alternatives to
the traditional family have arisen as various subcultures. Ethan Watters
elucidated this social trend in his book defining urban tribes as
"groups of never-married's between the ages of 25 and 45 who gather in
common-interest groups and enjoy an urban lifestyle". Analysis of the
long term perspective of street trends reveal that youth trends
bubble-up every five to ten years, and that individualism, anarchy and
self-realization, are universal in these trends.
In the process of
bubbling up, there are two important concepts to consider, that of
'diffusion' and 'defusion'. Fashion diffusion focuses on the individual
and the crowd, particularly in this case the spreading of fashion in a
systematic way from small scale to large scale institutions. It
highlights the idea that fashion innovation and creativity drawn from
subcultures are integrated into mass culture. In the process,
non-conformist fashion may be subject to defusion, a diluting of the
fundamental intrinsic meaning of the original subculture. The
commercialisation of fashion is especially central to the danger of
decontextualisation of trend origins. For example, the wearing of ripped
jeans, an accepted form of attire nowadays, does not necessarily relate
to the image of 'hippies' in modern times. The concept of identity and
its modifications and transformations after a period of time should be
carefully considered.
Analysis of street style is another
fundamental aspect in determining the extent of a bubble-up effect in
fashion. It is an idea that opposes the view that high fashion has given
way to popular culture. Polhemus proposed that "styles which start life
on the street corner have a way of ending up on the backs of top models
on the world's most prestigious fashion catwalks". Prior to this new
train of thought, the predominant view was that new looks began with
couture and 'trickle down' to the mass market mainline fashion industry.
Polhemus suggested that the evidence he found gave insight to a chain
of events; initially genuine street innovation appears, followed by the
featuring in mass media, such as magazines or television programmes, of
street kids. In time, the ritzy version of the original idea makes an
appearance, as a part of a top designer's collection.
Polhemus
identified two basic street-styles involving dressing up or dressing
down. Those from a relatively affluent sector of society, such as the
Beatniks and Hippies developed a penchant for the latter, preferring to
descend down the socio-economic ladder in the interest of authenticity.
Nowadays, the variety of attire seen on streets and nightclubs show that
culture is no longer only a prerogative of the upper class. Although,
the creatively democratic society that we progress towards optimizes
fashion innovation, cynics of the bubble-up effect, such as Johnny
Stuart, condemned in his book on rockers, "the fancy fashionable
versions of the Perfecto which you see all over the place, dilute the
significance, taking away its original magic, castrating it".
Social
crises of the 1950s and 1970s brought about new ideological
constructions in response to the worsening economy, scarcity of jobs,
loss of community, and the failure of consumerism to satisfy real needs.
Racism became a solution to the problems of working-class life. Such
periods of social turmoil resulted in fashion defusion, with many
subcultures becoming increasingly detached from their foundation
symbolisms. The connotations of the attire of the teddy boys during the
1970s bore little resemblance to the style of 1956. The original
narcissistic upper-class style was somewhat irrevocably lost in a wave
of 'second generation teds' that preferred fidelity to the classic
'bad-boy' stereotypes. The concept of specificity, subcultures
responding to circumstances at distinctive moments in history, is
depicted as vital to the study of subcultures.
Therefore the
resultant mass-consumed item may draw distance from the emblem of the
original subculture, attainable to all who can afford it. The loss of
identity may prove to be a serious problem as subcultures may feel
exploited, estranged and meaningless without a sense of belonging.
Subcultures established a sense of community to certain individuals
during a new post-war age that witnessed the deterioration of
traditional social groupings. Polhemus claims that subcultures like
Teddy Boys, Mods, Rockers, Skinheads, Rockabillies, Hipsters, Surfers,
Hippies, Rastafarians, Headbangers, Goths, etc, as "social phenomenon
style tribes cannot be dismissed as something transitory". Known as the
Kogal phenomenon, a subculture emerged where groups of young girls
between the ages of 15 and 18 appeared on the streets of Tokyo with long
dyed-brown or bleached-blond hair, tanned skin, heavy makeup, brightly
coloured miniskirts or short pants that flare out at the bottom, and
high platform boots.
'Field' has become more appropriate in the
analysis of fashion changes. People engaged in similar lifestyles with
intrinsically similar cultural capital, i.e. nationality, profession,
family and friends form group identities interacting with others in the
same 'field'. This has been an important contributing factor to the
birth of subcultures.The anachronistic belief that class was a
determinant of fashion has reduced significantly, as confirmed by
Bauman, who proposed the idea of 'liquid society', where fashion exists
in a more flexible and malleable state.
A particular phenomenon of
recent times, subject to both a trickle-down and a bubble-up effect of
varying degrees, is the democratization and globalization of fashion.
There has been an emergence of 'prêt-a-porter' invented by John Claude
Weill in 1949. This development has increased the speed and diffusion of
fashion trends across the world, which amplified the culture of fast
fashion, massification and global standardisation. Standardised
factory-made prêt-a-porter clothes, of which 'wearability' is crucial,
sometimes descend from places of high fashion, for example inspired from
couture. Designers such as Poiret, Dior and Lacroix produce a
ready-to-wear line alongside their haute couture collection to take
advantage of a wider market. Nevertheless, its mass-produced industrial
nature detracts away from the exclusivity of traditional couture.
By
1930, couturiers like Schiaparelli, Delauney, and Patou began to design
their own ready-to-wear boutiques, understanding the new emerging
system of fashion whereby the moment that people stop copying you, it
means that you are no longer any good. The democratization of couture
disallowed it to sustain its elitist nature and therefore haute couture
was beginning to accept that fashion was about emulation. Nevertheless,
attire was not entirely uniform and equalised. Subtle nuances continued
to mark social distinctions but mitigated the upper class penchant for
conspicuous consumption.
Democratising fashion came hand in hand
with a 'disunification' of feminine attire, which varied more in form
and became less homogeneous. The fundamental attraction of making profit
inspired innovation in styles and a perpetual search for lower costs
through efficient industrial manufacturing. Institutions were evolving
to an extent that the pretentious elitist sectors diminished in favour
of universal mass production. The end of the Second World War brought
about increased demand for fashion, encouraged by films and magazines of
the time and the take off of global advertising campaigns, i.e. Levi's,
Rodier, Benetton, Naf-Naf, etc, highlighting the need for high
standards of living, well-being and hedonistic mass culture. It is the
globalisation and rapidity of fashion movements, as Kawamura amply
discussed, that underline the fact that "fast-changing tastes of
consumers are matched only by the cleverness of the department store
that identifies trendsetters among young consumers and feeds their
knowledge into the production cycle".
It is impossible to conduct
discourse in fashion without associating it with change,
unpredictability and a high degree of uncertainty. It is very difficult
to distinguish which goods will be adorned by the mass population and
which trends will be instantaneously rejected. In general, industries
need economic capital and political solidarity to function but these
institutions are particularly difficult to uphold in the aesthetic
industry. A paradox exists in that while on a superficial level everyone
associates fashion with change, the underlying forces value stability.
They argue that it is not possible to speak of one single fashion, but
rather of different fashions existing at the same time. This is
especially the case for an intrinsically fast-paced, competitive and
fragmented industry. A bubble-up effect is inherent to a globalised
fashion world, and the upward flow of fashion stemming from various
subcultures contributes abundantly to this process.
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