The fashion system creates symbolic boundaries between what is fashion and what is not fashion and also determines what the legitimate aesthetic taste is. Producers of fashion, including designers and other fashion professionals who are agents of fashion, make a contribution in defining a taste that is represented as items of fashionable clothing.
After clothes are manufactured, they go through the transformation process and the mechanism of fashion production passing through different institutions. Individuals involved in the production of clothing manufacture items of garments, and then those items must go through the legitmation process and pass the criteria set by gatekeepers of fashion before they are disseminated to the public.
However, the designers alone cannot produce fashion, nor can they sustain the fashion system that leads to the making of fashion culture. Other producers of fashion besides designers, such as advertisers and marketers, also make a major contribution in fashion culture. Fashion is about change and the illusion of novelty. Those who take part in the production of fashion help create the ideology of fashion and determine which items of clothing will be defined as fashion and fashionable.
The link between the production/distribution of clothing and the dissemination of the idea of fashion is interdependent. The apparel industries serve as the primary traffic-builders and producers of profitable sales for, first of all, the customers of the textile industries and are, in turn, dependent on the retailers for the purchase and distribution of the goods they manufacture.
The fashion system has two types of diffusion agents: 1) designers who take part in seasonal fashion shows in Paris, London, Milan and New York, and are frequently the very conspicuous individuals who establish themselves as arbiters of good taste and surround themselves with a cult of personality, and 2) fashion journalists, editors, advertisers, marketers/merchandisers and publicists. We must find out the actual agencies through which fashion works so that we can review concrete ways in which fashion is formed and felt.
Now we explore diffusion theories of fashion from individual and institutional perspectives, aesthetic judgments of fashion, diffusion strategies, such as fashion dolls in the past and fashion shows today, fashion propaganda through the use of advertising, and technological influences on fashion diffusion.
Horn and Gurel explain: When clothing behavior is expressed in fashion, the behavior is still regular and predictable. Fashions in any area of life, especially fashions in clothing, are not random and purposeless. They reflect the cultural patterns of the times.
Fashions follow a progressive and irreversible path from inception through acceptance to culmination and eventual decline, and they also tend to parallel to some extent the larger events of history. (1975: 2) Diffusion is the spread of fashion within and across social systems.
Whereas the adoption process focuses on individual decision-making, the diffusion process centers on the decision of many people to adopt an innovation. How fast and how far an innovation diffuses are influenced by several factors: formal communications from the mass media, personal communications among current adopters and potential adopters, the persuasive influence of consumer leaders and other agents, and the degree to which the innovation is communicated and transferred from one social system to another. It is often believed that it is the designers who impose a new fashion upon the public in order to stimulate the market and the economy. But clothing manufacturers are necessary because they work with fashion producers who produce the idea of fashion. Consumers always want something fashionable and follow fashion because fashion is believed to be desirable.
Diffusion theories of fashion can focus on individuals, which can give a small-scale analysis, and on institutions, which is a systematic, large-scale approach. One can take into account both psychological and sociological elements in the fashion diffusion.
Fashion can be studied either from the point of view of the individual as the early psychologists indicated, or from the point of view of the structure and function of society as a whole as many sociologists would do. Fashion adoption and diffusion could also be the result of individual aspirations and necessities as they are formed by the social system with which the individual comes into contact.
In the context of clothing fashion adoption, innovativeness and opinion leadership are highly related. Moreover, in societies oriented toward change, the overlap of innovation and opinion leadership is greater than in more tradition-oriented cultures.
Diffusion theories of fashion seek to explain how fashion is adopted by many people within a social system. A social system might be the residents of a city, the students of a school, a group of friends, or any other group of individuals who regularly interact.
Each interaction can be considered an act of communication through which information and influence concerning an innovation, such as new styles of clothing, can be spread.
According to Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), informal person-to-person communication influences everyday situations, and their study showed that verbal personal influence was the most effective type of communication in fashion situations.
It was the reaction of friends and acquaintances or salespeople on seeing a woman’s hairdo or dress that counted, and in most cases, women influence other women like themselves. Approval and admiration will encourage behavior of the same kind; disapproval or disdain will tend to bring about a change in dress.
In this way, fashion diffusion can first be explained from a micro-scale interpersonal perspective. Communications can also enter a social system from other social systems. Ultimately, awareness of the innovation is diffused to most members of the social system through the combined influence of external sources and interpersonal communications within the system. Then the innovation is recognized as fashion, and for that, legitimation is indispensable.
The fashion system invents new cultural meanings, and this invention is undertaken by opinion leaders who help shape and refine existing cultural meaning, encouraging the reform of cultural categories and principles.
These groups and individuals are sources of meaning for the masses, and they invent and deliver symbolic meanings that are largely constructed by prevailing cultural co-ordinates established by cultural categories and cultural principles. These groups are also permeable to cultural innovations, changes in style, value and attitudes which they then pass along to the subordinate parties who imitate them (McCracken 1988: 80).
Therefore, in order to understand the diffusion of fashion, we must first consider the roles played by those social groups most directly connected with its propagation. It does not matter who plays the roles, but it is very important that the roles are played.
In the aristocratic society of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the fashion leaders were members of royalty. Their showcases were the royal courts. The best artisans were called upon to adorn the sumptuously elegant costumes that were paraded in the splendid setting of the French court.
As patrons of the theater, royal families donated their clothes to their favorite actors, making the theater a vehicle for popularizing the fashions set by the royal court (Brenninkmeyer 1963). This policy continued in France until the Revolution, when actresses began creating their own costumes for the stage.
Then a period of deterioration followed, and it was not until the years 1875 to 1918 that the theater again became the center for fashion inspiration. Fashions began to emerge from stage costumes and hairstyles often acquired the name of the actress who wore them.
In democratic societies where there are no royals, politicans’ wives, such as Jackie Kennedy, and celebrities, like Madonna, have become the leaders of fashion. The works of the designers receive attention when the designs are worn by celebrities and photographers. In this way, producers of fashion and consumers of fashion complement each other in maintaining the ideology of fashion.
Fashion cannot be entirely accounted for in terms of individuals, either on the side of the producers or the wearers. For a new style to become fashionable, it must in some way appeal to a large number of people. The clothing habits of an individual are the result of group life.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when much of the work on fashion using diffusion models was done, diffusion models were conceptualized as relatively unorganized interpersonal processes, but today, fashion diffusion is highly organized and managed within cultural production systems that are intended to maximize the extent of diffusion.
However, large-scale diffusion processes such as those affecting fashionable clothing are difficult to study systematically (Crane 1999: 13), and so what Fashion-ology can provide is individuals and institutions involved in the diffusion process of fashion, and it does not try to discover exactly how long items of garments take to be labeled as fashion and remain fashionable.
Changes in the relationships between fashion organizations and their publics have affected what is diffused, how it is diffused, and to whom. The source of fashion diffusion used to be a highly centralized system, initially started in Paris.
Innovators belonged to a community that could be understood in terms of Becker’s concept of art world, a cluster of individuals and organizations involved in the production, evaluation, and dissemination of a specific form of culture (1982).
Fashion worlds comprised designers, publicists, owners of trendy fashion boutiques and local fashion publics, consisting of fashion-conscious individuals. Opinion leaders included editors of leading fashion magazines and highly visible fashion consumers, such as society women, movie stars, and popular music stars (Crane 1999: 16). Awareness of fashion innovations was stimulated by fashion printed in fashion magazines and periodicals.
There is a view that the centralized fashion system has been replaced by another system, and according to Crane (1999) fashion designers in several countries create designs for small publics in global markets. Trends are now set by fashion forecasters, fashion editors, and department store buyers.
Industrial manufacturers are consumer driven, and market trends originate in many types of social groups, including adolescent urban subcultures, and consequently, fashion emanates from many sources and diffuses in various ways to different publics (Crane 1999: 13).
At the same time, the distinction between production and consumption is becoming increasingly hazy and blurry. Without a system that includes a diffusion mechanism, any style of dress is confined within its own system of clothing.
The diffusion of fashion has become more difficult to study because the creation of fashion has become less centralized. The increasing decentralization and complexity of the fashion system has necessitated the development of fashion forecasting, which began in 1969.
Forecasters consult with fabric designers to predict colors and fabrics a few years before a particular style is marketed.