inkbluesky

Fashionomics - Fashion should be taken seriously

This process may sound like a lot of work, but it has important benefits—not just for those who succeed in producing and consuming a fashion, but also for those who got it wrong last time by making bad investments in socially consumed assets. When a fashion cycle comes to an end, those who placed unfortunate bets during it are put back on a more nearly equal footing with those who were successfully fashionable. To be fashionable in the next cycle, fashion victor and fashion victim alike must pay the price of tooling up again in line with the latest trends.

Fashion cycles may, therefore, play a significant redistribution role in society that redeems their wasteful, throwaway aspect, which conservatives and Marxists alike abhor.

Potts makes some good, if obvious points about fashion as an important facet of a robust economy. He also manages to ignore completely the environmental and cultural consequences of unbridled consumption. In galactic terms we live on a speck of dust traveling through space. A very valuable speck since there don’t seem to be any others close by that support carbon based life. Everything that humans use whether its jeans or SUVs is derived from the environment. As some may have noticed we’re not too great at managing even renewable resources - for example 96% of the U.S. old growth forests are gone while we’ve lost 53% of our wetlands. There comes a point where consumption becomes marginally decadent.

Potts other problem seems to be that he bought a political science textbook and is going to use the definitions in it despite the any realities to the contrary, i.e. “conservatives and Marxists alike abhor”. I could give him the benefit of a doubt and assume that he simply meant to include the entire political spectrum. On the other hand the history of conservatism in America as it is actually practiced has embraced waste, decadence and absorption with self interest since the age of the robber barons. While Stalin was not a true collectivist he was a type of Marxist as China’s still is today. The old Soviet Union was a near paragon of waste - not from the get go in 1905, but soon after the USSR found new and inventive ways to waste both human and natural resources. Then one wonders how a nation that suffered almost its entire existence in perpetual shortage of even basic commodities like toilet paper could have found time to wield so much havoc on its environment.

amber ice 

Like clothes everything that people use is generally designed, even matchboxes. These matchboxes are from the fifties and sixties, for the most part from Eastern Europe. Those that like retro pop design should like them. The sixties being the beginning of the competing U.S./U.S.S.R space programs probably accounts for the fair number of rocket themes.