Fads, Fashions and ‘Real’ Innovations Novelties and Social Change Jukka Gronow
The Novelty of Fashion
A new fashion is by definition a novelty and, as such, is an invention. This is after all why fashion seduces its customers. Since fashion, at least in the fields of consumption with an institutionalized system of fashion like clothing, repeats itself in cycles, these novelties make their appearance at regular intervals. The best examples come naturally from the world of clothes with its eternally repeating cycles of new designs with broader or narrower, shorter or longer legs of trousers, bigger or smaller buttons, longer or shorter haircuts, blue or yellow colour tones, and so on. Fashion designs are often re-used or re-circulated but they never simply copy older models. Mostly, they make their reappearance in new contexts and in new combinations. Not even planned retro-fashions (‘back to the $6 0 \mathrm { s } '$ , for example)<sup>1</sup> simply repeat old ones. As any comparison with their older prototypes proves, the present fashion has always something new to offer. In order to be successful, any fashion must claim to be a novelty and, as such, a real invention.
Obviously, fashions can change rapidly or slowly. The normal cycles of the field of clothes fashion have been seasonal for the last hundred years or so but during the seventeenth century Parisian fashion – already the centre of European clothes culture – changed every seventh year (Mennell 1985). In clothing fashions, several uncoordinated cycles can operate at the same time. Fashions can be identified in many other areas of consumption and social life, too. Car models began to ‘fluctuate annually almost like clothes after the big American car producers successfully adopted the idea of continuous cycles in their marketing, an idea that was totally opposed to Ford’s original idea of the extremely functional Model T which was there to stay (Löfgren 2006). The producers of many other consumer durables have, however, tried in vain to adopt the same planned obsolescence in their marketing. For some reason it does not seem to be as natural to market new refrigerators or freezers in the same way. Fashion cycles in naming children in Germany and the USA follow much longer, generational cycles (Gerhards 2003; Lieberson 2000).
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