Yeah! That was my thought as well. Unfortunately, despite combing through fashion theory, there’s not much literature on the subject; I’ve had to make a lot of it up as I go. I wrote a bit in the essay linked above about it:
In the Upper-Middle Paleolithic Transition, human societies and economies grow increasingly complex. Trade deals and diplomacy are performed among credible spokesmen, and social hierarchies need preservation across interactions between strangers. Fashion enters as a technology for maintaining and navigating the social graph. “By the production of symbolic artefacts that signified different social groups and kinds of relationships, Aurignacian people were able to maintain wider networks that could exist even between people who had never set eyes on each other,” giving them a competitive advantage. The practice spreads through the law of cultural evolution: “The surface of the body… becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialisation is enacted, and body adornment… becomes the language through which it was expressed.”[5] We have entered the second stage of simulacra. The territory has a map, and there are parties interested in manipulating it.
Once this association between optics and essence, between appearance and reality, between signal and quality (the biological frame) or public and private information (the economic one), is formed, it can be freeridden. It becomes, in most cases, easier to pay “lip service”—to outwardly express the associated public characteristic—than it is to to develop the private characteristic. This is not entirely the fault of the freerider; it is a difficult situation he finds himself in. Imagine he “chooses” (I’m anthropomorphizing evolution) to remain with his blue and yellow colors: even if his “product” is “good” (I’m mixing metaphors, but I mean to say, his advertising is honest), it will take some time for a trusted association between signal and quality, public and private, to form. As consumers, we may initially disbelieve an advertiser’s claims, and for good reason, since there is incentive to deceive. And thus it is with the sun-basking lizard, deciding which butterfly to eat. Far easier for a precarious insect to ride coattails, to imitate and pretend toward what he is not—and so, quite simply, it does.
The connection with fashion should come into view now. The “barberpole” metaphor of fashion, where lower classes continually imitate higher classes, who are themselves engaged in a continual quest for “distinction” from the chasing masses, is a popular one in rationalist circles for good reason. Its cyclical nature is the result of limited options and a continual evasion of freeriders who exploit an associative proxy: clothing for caste.
Recently I’ve been considering the frame of a discoordination game, in which it is one actor’s interest to synchronize with the other actor, and in the other actor’s interest to stay de-synchronized (“distinguished” or “distinct” a la Bourdieu).
Yeah! That was my thought as well. Unfortunately, despite combing through fashion theory, there’s not much literature on the subject; I’ve had to make a lot of it up as I go. I wrote a bit in the essay linked above about it:
Recently I’ve been considering the frame of a discoordination game, in which it is one actor’s interest to synchronize with the other actor, and in the other actor’s interest to stay de-synchronized (“distinguished” or “distinct” a la Bourdieu).