Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

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)¹ 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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Even though the same stylistic elements can repeat themselves or disappear without any trace from one cycle to another, once they are in fashion they become equally binding and compelling. Last year’s models are totally out of fashion and look ridiculous on their bearers. The same fate, as we all know, awaits this season’s fashion in the near future. The paradox of fashion is that, at the same time as it establishes its socially binding and pseudo-normative power over consumers as the only possible alternative at the moment, there is no rule – other than the fashion itself – which dictates what the present fashion should look like. There is no reason why legs of trousers should be long or short, broad or narrow. Following Georg Simmel (1902), one could claim that the decisive test of whether fashion cycles can operate in any one field of culture is to ask if things could just as well be otherwise. In other words, fashion is contingent; it constitutes a self-dynamic social process (Mayntz and Nedelmann 1987). The economic function of fashion is to make commodities prematurely obsolete and to accelerate the circulation of goods, but to fulfil this function any design is good enough, as long as it is new and succeeds in establishing itself as a fashion with its claim of exclusive validity. A particular fashion design does not have any other function. It could just as well be something else. Fashion offers us novelties for sake of the novelty.

This does not mean that ‘anything goes’ – what is fashionable at any one time is always quite exclusive and obliging. Despite trend-setters and their active efforts at marketing the next, or the next-next fashion, fashion itself retains a strong element of mystery. This does not mean that some fashionable novelties do not meet active and strong resistance. Not every consumer is willing to accept and adopt them. Such resistance against fashion can be of a dual nature. It can be directed either towards the whole institution of fashion, which can be experienced as external social coercion unnecessarily requiring us to comply with its power. Such resistance can be a sign of traditionalism and cultural inertia but can equally well be a result of an anti-consumerist consciousness. But resistance can also signal that a specific fashion design threatens some existing cultural or moral norms. Clear breaks with the traditions of clothing have often been connected with gender and generational rules of clothing. In post-war Europe many, for instance, experienced boys with long hair or girls in trousers as a serious threat to the traditional, established social order. In such cases, when appearing for the first time, a new fashion can make a real difference. Aesthetic taste has often had an ethical dimension (Gronow 1987). But once resistance has been broken and new habits have been established, a new fashion like the mini-skirt can peacefully join the available repertoire of fashion designs. It can circulate eternally as ‘just’ one more fashion.

From the point of view of the producer or seller of fashion, a new design is always genuinely innovative and is often a result of a tedious creative process, but fashion does not really make any difference in the world. Fashions are ‘only’ functional equivalents to one another (Meyersohn and Katz 1957: 595).

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In sociological discussions of fashion inspired by Georg Simmel’s classical contribution, fashion has been analysed mainly from the point of view of its social origins, functions and cultural meanings. According to Simmel (1902), fashion originated from the dual process of social distinction and identification. Even though its standards are rapidly changing, fleeting and ephemeral, fashion creates social order by offering guidelines to orientation in a rapidly changing world. It is a harmless way to learn how to cope with the rapid social and cultural change typical of the modern societies (cf. Lipovetsky 1994). Fashion is therefore a phenomenon of modernity par excellence, fleeting, changing and quite impossible to get a grip on. From the point of view of its wider cultural meaning, the particular contents of any particular fashion, as well as their process of production and distribution, are of less importance. Owing to its contingent nature, anything will, after all, do just as long as it is new – or is experienced as such.

Technical Inventions vs Social Innovations

Despite their seeming frivolity, fashions are real social and cultural inventions. No doubt, fashion designers and trend-setters work hard to create and invent the new ‘revolutionary’ models and designs to come. But they are no ‘real’ innovations. Despite the seemingly close resemblance between fashion and innovations as dynamics of cultural and social change, I have not found any studies which seriously and systematically reflect on the relation between these two extremely interesting and important social phenomena. As a matter of fact, the way that the great classic figure of innovation studies, Joseph Schumpeter, described innovation, it resembled ‘Simmelian’ fashion processes (Schumpeter 1911, 1939; also Kovács 2007). In Schumpeter’s opinion, the ‘raw material’ of innovations, techno-scientific inventions, is on offer in large numbers. Chance alone seems to determine which will develop into real innovations. At any one time, only a few will end up as ‘technical raw material’ to an innovation. The transformation of an invention into an innovation and its further social diffusion follow a path similar to that of fashions: from just a few original inventors it will spread first to early and then to later adopters, and finally to those lagging, until it has penetrated the whole spectrum of a society or one or more of its sectors.

Schumpeter was mainly interested in this social process of innovation, in which, in his opinion, risk-taking entrepreneurs played a decisive role. The more technical and economic aspects of inventions were of less interest to him because only a small minority of inventions would ever develop into innovations, and, consequently, there was no lack of potential candidates. Inventions practically wait to be taken into use or turned into innovations by an active and innovative entrepreneur. The main obstacles to the innovative process in promoting socio-economic change and progress were not primarily of a technical or economic nature. The most demanding task a successful innovator-entrepreneur had to accomplish was to do the same thing expected from a fashion designer, that is, to seize an opportunity at the right time and to convince customers that they really need a particular invention. In doing so, an innovator might have to break the resistance of customers towards the invention. The extremely difficult job was to challenge and change traditions, habits and routines and thereby to open a way to a new path of social development. To accomplish all this, Schumpeter expected his innovator-entrepreneur to have almost heroic qualities. The resistance to innovations could include political, juridical and institutional limitations of all kinds and could be expressed in various ways, from harmless nonchalance, to strong disapproval and animosity, or even legal prohibitions.

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The story of the shirt-pocket radio could serve as an ‘ideal-typical’ innovation process.² As Schiffer (1993) shows, technical solutions and models of a portable radio existed a long time before it became a marketable commodity. Even after the invention of the transistor in 1947 it took almost ten years before the shirt-pocket radio became a commercial success. This time lag was not the result solely of high prices or the inferior technical qualities of earlier models. When the local radio stations started broadcasting rock and roll music, American teenagers often defied their parents’ strong disapproval to listen, and the shirt-pocket radio satisfied this new ‘need’. Soon a new group of enthusiastic young customers were willing to experiment with totally new manners of listening to music.

Schiffer makes a useful addition to Schumpeter’s theory of innovation by pointing out the important role of cultural imperatives:

A cultural imperative is a product fervently believed by a group – its constituency – to be desirable and inevitable, merely awaiting technological means for its realization … it is a fancy of a group, often a very small group, captivated by the vision. Members of the constituency are likely to believe that when the product is ‘perfected’ it will have popular appeal, but this belief may be little more than wishful thinking. (Schiffer 1993: 99)

This constituency of enthusiastic radio amateurs had existed decades before their cherished product found its broader customers and became an item of mass consumption. As Schiffer stressed, once the product has become commercialized, its possible successes and failures in the marketplace have nothing to do with the size or social character of its, often small, original constituency. The existence of such a constituency, resembling a hobby or art world (Becker 1982), is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the emergence and survival of an invention (Schiffer 1993: 113).³

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The Cultural Mediators in the Innovation Process

In many ways, this ‘gap’ between the original constituency, whether a group of enthusiastic amateurs, engineers or inventors, and the future wider group of buyers is what marketing and advertising departments try to fill in by offering ready-made models of life-styles and cultural practices that new products and services can fit into. For instance, in order to export Nordic walking sticks (Shove and Pantzar 2005), the company producing them has, very concretely, to export and make meaningful a totally new practice of walking with two sticks. When exported to other countries from Finland, the practice is radically transformed and effectively become quite another practice.

As Hennion et al. (1989) show, modern marketing and advertising are often as important a part of the process of product development as the scientific-technical laboratories and innovation centres of firms or universities. The gap between the producer and the seller, on the one hand, and the buyer or final customer, on the other hand, is not just a practical one. Their perspectives and the principles guiding their choices differ in principle (see Schulze 1992). Therefore, consumers have always played an active and creative part in the transformation of an invention into an innovation. Their role as co-innovators, however, has only recently received serious attention in innovation studies (McMeekin and Southerton 2007; cf. also Pantzar 1997). The consumer is as much the heroic innovator as the entrepreneur.

More often than not, innovations do not follow the original instructions for use suggested by their inventors or the entrepreneur who actively promotes them. Bell’s telephone is already a classical example. He expected it to be used strictly for business and he could hardly imagine its use for pleasure and socializing. Today, by contrast, big corporations that actively promote and invest in new inventions try more systematically and extensively to integrate customers into an active role in the innovation process from the beginning (Kotro and Pantzar 2002: 39). On the other hand, an overwhelming majority of the novelties that reach the consumer goods market each year are more likely to be small variations or improvements on older products and therefore find a ready-made slot in the customary patterns of consumption. ‘Big’ innovations demanding drastic changes in the lives of their consumers are, after all, quite rare. Such revolutionary innovations do not appear on the market weekly or monthly and probably not even annually. It still makes sense to think of some important technical inventions, like automobiles, radios, TVs, refrigerators or the instruments of modern communication technology, as turning points or markers of historical periods in modern consumer society. It is, however, remarkable how different the time trajectories of many familiar items of home electronics and durables have been in different European countries (Tellis et al. 2003: 190). Quite often the original function of a new technical invention has been turned into its opposite, from ‘toys’ to ‘instruments’, from ‘instruments’ to ‘pleasure’ (Kotro and Pantzar 2002).

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Fashion and Innovations

For Schumpeter, what distinguishes innovations from fashion cannot be found in the technical or economic nature or complexity of novelties – the scale is gradual – but in the nature of the social change they initiate and even presume. While a new fashionable design is relatively harmless or trivial, and it disappears from the social scene without trace almost at the very moment it has entered it, Schumpeterian innovations, as a rule, are here to stay. By their presence they make a real difference. This change can be smaller or bigger, more or less permanent, more or less encompassing, but it can always be identified. The mobile phone is an example which comes easily to mind. It is not just another fashionable model of the wired phone. On the contrary, it has dramatically changed our everyday habits of communication, creating totally new social practices. In many countries for example, the cell phone met resistance as an ‘uncivilized’ manner of communication. Now, in its turn, the cell phone has its own regular fashion cycles.

What, then, distinguishes a mere fashionable novelty à la Simmel from a genuinely innovative novelty à la Schumpeter? The technical or purely economic differences will not really do as an explanation. It is not reasonable to look for such differences in relative technical complexity or economic investments demanded. These could vary from case to case among innovations and fashions, even though one could empirically claim that the average Schumpeterian innovation would be more capital- and time-intensive than fashions. However, being an inventor of a new popular fashion or a first-comer among the competing firms in a fashion market can certainly make a big economic difference to the firms concerned. Similarly, the very emergence and establishment of the social system of fashion in any one field of consumption change its social character quite radically through the imperative of eternal change. The main distinction between these two novelties, fashion and innovation, is the real impact they have on people’s social routines or habits and the extent to which they change social practices (see Warde 2005). Despite its novelty, a new fashion does not change any social habits. It leaves everything as it was. The idea of a more or less decisive and radical break with previous cultural traditions and social habits is, on the other hand, built into the very concept of a Schumpeterian innovation. Distinct from fashions, they can be compared to styles. As Ted Polhemus argued, ‘a style isn’t trendy . . . It’s inherently conservative and traditional’ (1994: 13). A new style is a ‘real’ social innovation which changes the lives of those involved.

New social and cultural practices are an essential part of innovation, but they can also ‘invite’ inventions and promote the transformation of inventions into innovations. McMeekin and Southerton (2007), in arguing for the important role of final consumption in the innovation process, emphasize that ‘the process of appropriating goods and services into practices is itself innovative, and as social practices change, “spaces” (or demand, needs and wants) for new innovations emerge’. Kotro and Pantzar, speaking of the cultural landscape of a product, point out the importance of the new cultural meanings and interpretations related to a specific object (2002: 31).

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Fads and Fashions

To clarify the difference between innovation and fashion clearer, it is useful to pay attention to a third social phenomenon in between these two, and equally typical of modern consumption. Despite the fact that fads are extremely important and quite common social phenomena, they have hardly been analysed sociologically. Meyersohn and Katz (1957) are an important exception. They did not, however, systematically distinguish between fashions and fads.⁴ Fads are like fashions. They come and go, without any obvious reason and without leaving any deeper or more permanent traces in the community. They are like ‘real’ innovations in that they do not appear within a regular fashion cycle, like a new fashionable design. New fads are not the functional equivalents to any previous fads. As ‘real’ novelties they thus have to create themselves a social place of their own, and the habits, routines and new meanings attached to them.

Fads are typical among children and teenagers, who obviously have more need of simple and visible signs and symbols of common taste than adults do. Fads can be found in particular in various worlds of play and games. Good examples are hula hoops, yo-yos and the small collapsible metal scooters that made their sudden appearance about ten years ago. Fads seldom require great technical invention. Their prototypes are found as if ready-made. They can be modifications of some older products that have been around for a long time. This does not, as such, distinguish them form more ‘serious’ inventions. Even these can have existed among their own constituencies for a long time before being ‘discovered’ by entrepreneurs and the broader public. No great effort in the production process turns an invention into an innovation. Instead it is distinguished by its reception and integration into the social world of its users, even against their resistance.

Fads typically hit their customers like a storm and conquer them almost overnight. Suddenly, in my childhood, every kid in the neighbourhood had to swing a hula hoop or wear a self-illuminating Phantom ring. They could, even more than ordinary fashion, be understood as a typical crowd phenomenon. Often they are the only thing that unites otherwise totally disparate people whose fascination they have captured. Everyone has to have them, not just something similar but exactly the right make and model. After conquering the whole market they disappear as quickly as they appeared, just like fashions. Unlike fashion, however, they do not leave behind an empty place immediately to be filled up by another fashion. It can take a long time before another fad conquers the same group of consumers again. In some cases, they may turn into valuable and rare collectable items, or they remain cherished and hibernating among smaller groups, in which case they can become ordinary hobby objects. They can even make a comeback, but this renewed effort hardly ever manages to live up to the expectations created by their former glory. Some fads can even become a permanent part of the life of their consumers. This would turn them into real innovations.

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Pure fads typically belong to the less serious spheres of social life, to children’s worlds of play and game. Their capriciousness would therefore seem natural. But to characterize them simply as capricious or trivial does not explain anything. It is only another way of referring to their short life span and to the fact that they do not, as a rule, leave any permanent traces in human culture.

We can now better formulate what makes the difference between a fashion and a fad, on the one hand, and a ‘real’ innovation, on the other hand. As we have interpreted Schumpeter, the important thing in any process of innovation is the integration of a technical invention into a new social practice. First becoming part of its own practice makes an invention into an innovation. Whereas a fashion always remains embedded in the same old social practice, both fads and ‘real’ innovations have to find and establish new social and cultural practices. What separates a fad from a ‘serious’ or more long-lasting innovation is that a fad establishes only a very limited play-like social world of routines and practices of its own. As a rule, it leaves the world outside its limited scope untouched. Even though millions of children and even adults exercised enthusiastically with their hula hoops at the same time – its mastery took practice – and their diffusion assumed an almost epidemic scale, they did not change any other social practices or the cultural habits of their practitioners. They remained hobby items and their social and cultural extension was very limited. In contrast, a successful commercial innovation which will leave long-term effects behind it obviously has to penetrate and change wider social practices. According to Lehtonen, ‘the higher the number of attachments and practices that are potentially connected with a technology and the better it fulfils the promise associated with it, the more likely a technology is to be seen as something “necessary”’ (2003: 371). If, for instance, the mobile phone had remained just a wireless phone, or a toy to play with, it would not have revolutionized our culture to the present extent. Today the cell phone has multiple functions, with different degrees of importance to different social user groups, but everywhere it has clearly changed ‘the path of development by breaking with former routines and habits’ (2003: 371).

The Establishment of New Markets

There is, however, one principal problem in analysing inventions and their transformation into innovation from the point of view of their social and cultural evolution, as Schumpeter suggested. The firm can only observe, and is only concerned with the market and the market roles and performance of its close competitors. It does not have any direct access to information about the taste, habits and preferences of its consumers. (Market research tries to overcome this, but it is always faced with limitations on what it can observe. The information that guides a firm’s actions is different from that of its customers.) From the point of view of a firm, the decisive criterion of an innovation or a ‘real’ novelty is whether or not it is a part of the same market segment as the old product, or if it has created a market of its own. There is no other way for the firm to know when it or its competitors have succeeded in producing a new product and not just a copy or a new version of an old one.

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Following White’s suggestion, we can treat markets as ‘induced role structures’ (White 1981a) or ‘self-reproducing social structures among specific cliques of firms and other actors who evolve roles from observations of each other’s behaviour (White 1981b: 518). In any market the firms differ from one another as far as their production volumes and cost-structures are concerned, but, equally importantly, their products’ ‘taste structures’ can also be ranked by quality. Aspers makes a distinction between a standard market and a status market in which the status orders between the firms in a market are relatively stable (2005: 19; 2007). The case of totally homogenous products (perfect competition), the quality of which does not differ, is quite exceptional. Normally any market consists of only a relatively small number of firms which have established and preserved their own product niches. They have relatively stable roles as producers of a particular good and their identities are based on their own and their competitors’ mutual expectations. Almost tautologically, then, any novelty or improvement stays within one and the same market as long as the firms relate to its production costs and relative quality or status as competitors and take it into account in their strategic considerations. Once this is not the case, a new market has been established and a real innovation has been born.

The establishment of a separate market for mini-vans is probably the most significant development in the recent history of the motor vehicle industry. Analysing this example, Rosa et al. (1999: 70) argue that the emergence of a new market is equal to the stabilization of the usage of a new product category label, in this historical case the mini-van as distinct from station wagons, cars, trucks, and so on. The establishment of the separate mini-van market by old, established car firms was typically preceded by ‘endogenous and exogenous disturbances’ that ‘give rise to novel experiences and perspectives on product usage and marketing’ (1999: 67). Both the producers and the consumers gradually came to regard the mini-van as a category distinct from other kinds of cars in the wider market. Rosa et al. also offer an interesting example of the important role of the mass media as gate-keepers, as the ‘institutional regulators’ (cf. Hirsch 1972: 654), in this case mainly motor journalists, in creating new product labels, categories and thereby innovations. In the well-established fashion markets such regulators, like professional fashion journalists and critics, are firmly institutionalized.

Product differentiation can take place gradually, or a new product can break with its ‘mother’ market more abruptly, but the end result is really what counts. Many great and far-reaching innovations started out as gradual improvements or changes in an old product or service, through gradual product differentiation or the merging of two or more old products.⁵ In this way novelties can presumably expect to face less resistance. Even a new fashion can undoubtedly start its life through product differentiation. In fact, only fads never result from ‘natural’ product development or differentiation. They are, by definition, one-time creations which establish a totally isolated and short-lived market of their own. In these markets the first-comers play a decisive role and the number of competing firms is usually very limited, at least in the beginning. On the other hand, if the costs of product development are low and imitation easy, the market is open for new potential competitors. As soon as the latecomers have grasped the opportunity, it is too late, since the fad is no longer growing in popularity and the market is soon so saturated as to become totally extinguished.

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It is essential to White’s analysis that a firm can only use a limited amount of information in judging its own and its competitors’ positions in the market role structure. Firms observe each other. All the firms producing and selling related products or services form a group of partly overlapping clusters which are concentrated around the biggest firm in the market. The only firms that really matter are those which, according to some relatively limited criteria such as production technique, marketing and product quality, are regarded as rivals. (For an interesting empirical example in the Scottish knitwear industry, see Porac et al. 1995.) Since the firms usually have no direct information about their consumers’ demands and tastes at their disposal, they reproduce their market positions – or create new ones – mainly by observing their closest competitors. A ‘real’ innovation is always equal to the emergence of a new role set for the cluster of firms and, thus, a new market emerges. When the car industry developed the new mini-van, the same actors could successfully coordinate the emergence of a new product and more or less reproduce and preserve their old relative positions in this new market.

Conclusion

I have claimed that among the consumers or users the criterion of a ‘real’ innovation depends on the degree to which its adoption and spread has broken old routines and habits and has succeeded in establishing new ones. As a rule, new product labels emerge in this process (cf. Meyersohn and Katz 1957). It would seem natural that these two sides of the coin – the firm and the customer – must somehow coincide, mutually reinforce each other or, on the contrary, work against each other in individual cases. The Schumpeterian model of innovation presumes that the entrepreneur must play an active and even decisive role in the process of creating new practices and changing old ones in the use of his or her new product or service. Innovators need access to, and must be able to interfere in, the cultural habits and social practices of their potential customers. In order to succeed they would have to convince potential users of a new product that it is necessary and worthwhile, and they need to change their routines and habits, even when they actively resist. This is what firms try to do – with better or worse success – with their advertising, market research and marketing efforts. At times, they can be lucky enough to find a ready-made set of new practices awaiting their invention. Arvidsson pays attention to an important principle in brand management which could probably be applied more generally to innovation processes too: ‘brand management works by enabling or empowering the freedom of consumers so that it is likely to evolve in particular directions’ (2005: 244) In doing so, it can be just as important to resist certain uses as to invite others.

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