Fashion as a Social Happening: Lecture on Blumer's Collective Selection

Who is Blumer?
A sociologist just like Simmel, but writing 70 years later. Unlike Simmel, he has observed the fashion industry first-hand.

Blumer asks that fashion be taken seriously by those studying society. This is because, as he argues,

• Fashion includes more than clothing (or “adornment”)

And it is usually not perceived as fashion, but as “superior practice,” or natural. “The fashions which we can now detect in the past history of philosophy, medicine, science, technological use and industrial practice did not appear as fashions to those who shared them. The fashions merely appeared to them as up-to-date achievements!” (11)

• Fashion is socially important

“For example, the styles in art, the themes and styles in literature, the forms and themes in entertainment, the perspectives in philosophy, the practices in business, and the preoccupations in science may be affected profoundly by fashion. These are not peripheral matters … where fashion operates it assumes an imperative position” (1).

• Fashion is a rational behavior

“While people may become excited over a fashion they respond primarily to its character of propriety and social distinction … Fashion has respectability” (3).

Simmel’s trickle-down theory provided some key ideas:

• The importance of prestige in the operation of fashion
• The identification of the essence of fashion as a process of change that is natural rather than aberrant

“Yet, despite the fact that his analysis still remains the best in the published literature, it failed to catch the character of fashion as a social happening” (4).

Simmel’s view that fashions come into style because of the “stamp of distinction conferred on them by the elite” misses that these styles are already in fashion. “It is not the prestige of the elite which makes the design fashionable, but instead, it is the suitability or potential fashionableness of the design which allows the prestige of the elite to be attached to it” (6).

• The elite strive to follow the direction of fashion rather than to set it.
• The elite have to choose between competing proposals of fashion, and their choice is not always based on the prestige of the fashion innovator.

People still conspicuously consume, etc., but do so not to show their prestige in the class structure, but rather to show their Fashionability.

Class structure in the 20th century was entirely different from the centuries that came before. Contemporary society has a more diverse class structure and an emphasis on modernity. By “modernity,” Blumer can be taken to mean the Zeitgeist, as we have used the word in this class.

Blumer expands on this increasingly diverse class structure by outlining the societal conditions for the appearance of fashion. Fashion emerges in societies

• “… with people ready to revise or discard old practices, beliefs, and attachments, and poised to adopt new social forms; there must be this thrust into the future” (9). Where being “up-to-date” brings social prestige.
• “…open to the recurrent presentation of models or proposals of new social forms” (10).
• where there is freedom to choose between competing models of fashion.
• where there is no truth or value that makes one of these competing models inherently better than the other.
• where prestige figures exist to promote on of the competing models.
• Where there is openness to the idea of the “new,” whether it be from the influence outside events, other people, or changes in social interactions.

The adherence to the Zeitgeist is demonstrated within in the setting of the fashion industry:

• “….the setting or determination of fashion takes place actually through an intense process of selection” (4) where buyers mediate the overwhelming number of options presented by designers to the consumers who buy them.
• “…buyers were immersed in and preoccupied with a remarkably common world of intense stimulation” (4). This allows them to evolve similar “sensitivities” and “appreciations” so that they make very similar buying decisions without knowledge of each others’ decisions. Through this process, “…the buyers became the unwitting surrogates of the fashion public. Their success, indeed their vocational fate, depended on their ability to sense the direction of taste in this public” (5).
• Fashion designers derive their ideas from
• Historical or exotic costume and
• Current and recent styles. This accounts for the historical continuity or the evolution of the fashion silhouette, so that very rarely does an extreme change take place. He calls fashion changes “trends,” and gives the name “fads” to popular adornments with no “forerunner” and no “successor.”
• Modernity or The Zeitgeist of the present: “…the most recent expressions of modernity as these were to be seen in such areas as the fine arts, recent literature, political debates and happenings, and discourse in the sophisticated world. The dress designers were engaged in translating themes from these areas and media into dress designs” (5).
  

There is more than one factor determining fashion change (more than the designer or the prestige figure). Fashion changes are collectively selected by the interplay between the changing (but as yet undetermined) taste of the public and the desire of the designer to give shape to “modernity” or the Zeitgeist, of which the public is part.

“Fashion appears much more as a collective groping for the proximate future than a channeled movement laid down by prestige full figures” (6).

This “collective groping” towards new forms of collective taste comes from the desire to connect socially with other people. It is a striving to communicate. This is why fashion change seems to happen more rapidly in places and societies where there is a chance to interact with more people, and more diverse people (and where this “newness” is valued, not feared).

Can be swayed by psychological motives, such as the desire to attractive, but this is by no means a determining factor in what is in fashion. Fashion is by nature social, not individual.