Friendly reminder that the Barber Pole Model of Fashion is utterly wrong. It makes sense, and I can understand why people might imagine that fashion works this way. However clothing is expensive and the lower classes can’t actually emulate the upper classes.
(Quick poll: do you own $800 shoes? Because that’s how a lower bound on how expensive your shoes need to be to pass as upper class).
Actually this is kind of a black mark on the community’s epistemic record. AFAICT everyone just assumed the model was correct and never bothered to check that fashion actually works that way?
Reblogging to remind myself that I have thoughts on this.
The argument specifically doesn’t say that the lower classes emulate the upper classes - just that they emulate the *class above them*, which is different than emulating the very upper class.
Also, how does fashion actually work?
I don’t have a Comprehensive Model of Fashion but some things to consider when I think about this more:
-class is not purely based on income. Anyone who’s sat through my mom’s rants on how important it is to differentiate oneself from “white trash” would know this but I recognize it isn’t a privilege everyone has been lucky enough to grow up with :P
-need to find something I read once on how baby name trends move through the classes (definitely a fashion, has zero cost barriers)
Anyone who thought the barber pole model was a complete account of fashion was pretty silly. But it’s also pretty clearly a reasonable component of an account of fashion. It’s one thing that happens; it’s not the only thing that happens.
I have a bunch of quibbles with the $800 shoes example, too.
This is a very specific subset of “upper class”, which often isn’t what people are referring to. I know the groups you’re talking about, but there are lots of people who would reasonably be described as “upper class” that mostly don’t wear $800 shoes pretty much ever.
Most people actually can’t tell the difference between 800 dollar shoes and 200 dollar shoes. It’s not that hard to find 200 dollar knockoffs of 800 dollar shoes. The differences do exist, and they make it hard to hard to fool people who really know and care about the difference. But most people don’t.
If you’re a person who is wearing 200 dollar shoes to imitate richer wearers of 800 dollar shoes, your peers, whom you’re actually trying to impress, probably can’t tell the difference either. You can easily have a fashion trend among class N of imitating what they think class N+1 does, even if they’re completely wrong. (See: “a stupid person’s idea of how a smart person talks”; Trump et al. as “a poor person’s idea of a rich person”).
Some class signals are expensive, but not all are, and those can easily be the subject of fashion trends. There have been points, at least, in the tech sector, where “wearing t-shirts to work” was effectively a positive class signal.
P.J. O'Rourke covered this in Modern Manners thirty years ago:
Dressing like a rich man is not, however, a matter of wearing flashy and expensive clothes. Life is not that simple Everyone wants what he doesn’t have. Everyone enjoys pretending to be what he isn’t. It’s poor men who wear flashy and expensive clothes, pretending to have money. Rich men wear sturdy and practical clothes, pretending to have brains. Thus, if you want people to think you’re wealthy, don’t dress rich, dress smart.
…
People who are actually smart wear orange short-sleeve shirts with plastic pen shields in the pocket, make eighteen thousand dollars a year designing electronic circuitry, and don’t know from neckties—which shows what brains will get you.
OK, derailing to ask the internet:
What is the discernible difference between $200 shoes and $800 shoes in a similar style? Because I sure as hell don’t know.
Are we just talking about, like, “extremely minor variances in stitching quality” and other connoisseur-tier rigamarole, or is there some substantive difference that you can see if you know what you’re doing?