This is the comment I’ve been thinking of trying to articulate, so thank you for doing it.
I’ve done serious clothing shopping maybe twice in the past . . . several years. I have no idea if the pants I got the more recent time are considered fashionable; they were comfortable, appropriate for a professional-level job such as the one I am intending to apply for, I liked them, and they were on sale. I got them and I left the store. The other time, I was going to a store that had what I wanted (which I happen to know is subcultural or at least not commonly available in department stores – hippyish loose colourful skirts). Small specialty store which I was told is now going out of business, so I’ll have to find somewhere else that has hippy skirts for me.
Purses to match my shoes? I have one pair of shoes and one pair of boots, and no purse at all. My wallet goes in my inner jacket pocket.
My jewelry is mostly like this; the only major category you missed is ‘religious’. (I might count “fidgeting supplies” as a minor category. . .)
My social circle’s styles tend to be jeans-and-t-shirts, jeans-and-flannel, quirky-in-jeweltoned-nice-textured-fabric, and business-casual. (Only the “quirky” category is strongly gendered.) I have one friend who might possibly parse as “fashion-conscious”, but I don’t actually know if she is; it’s not a subject that comes up. I know she’s fond of bargain-hunting, though.
I agree with people who are emphasizing the point that the OP’s social circle is not representative of the majority of our society at large, but I also know where he’s coming from. While I can’t say that many in my immediate circle are fashion-conscious in that way, my mom’s, sister’s, and GF’s circles are. My sister buys another pair of shoes just about every week despite the fact that she can’t even afford them comfortably. For her, buying shoes is not a matter of function.
I think focusing on jewelry helps your point better than clothing. As others have pointed out, one’s reason for buying a specific piece of clothing can lie anywhere on the spectrum from comfortable to trendy, or along many other dimensions (quality, price, etc.), but at any rate, everyone wears clothes by necessity.
No one needs to wear expensive jewelry (allowing for a few exceptions like perhaps wearing a wedding band to show you are unavailable), yet there are few gifts that the women in the circles I mentioned above would rather recieve than something with diamonds on it. They also unanimously agree that cubic zirconia is tacky and just plain wrong. Why?
I’m asking the same thing as the OP. The answers I’ve gotten from my mom or my GF are actually very much what the OP proposes: it’s a way to impress upon other women their social standing. They feel special and important when their SO spends so much on them and I believe the degree to which they feel this is in relation to the contrast between them and their female peers. If it became commonplace in a particular circle for every guy to spend X amount of money on his SO, that feeling would go away and it would require 2X to produce the same effect.
My guess is “They’ve bought into the social delusion that colourless stones are rendered interesting by artificial scarcity and price inflation.”
There is a lot of effort and advertising put into equating diamonds with love; it’s not terribly surprising that this is at least somewhat effective. If someone’s operating from that viewpoint, a zirconium (just as boring to me as a diamond, but at least the boredom comes cheaper) is trying to pass off an illusion-of-diamond as real, and thus is associated with illusion-of-love. It’s a victory of advertising and materialism.
(I have a couple of pieces of ‘nice jewelry’. All of them but my engagement ring were gifts from one of my parents. I hardly ever wear any of them.)
Well, the thing I always think about is that if fashion weren’t really about impressing other people, it would never change. Why is something fashionable this year, and not next year? The climate hasn’t changed, so it’s not like I need warmer clothes this year.
The only reason that it is currently fashionable for women to wear boots that appear that they shoved their feet into the asses of muppets is that it impresses other people who notice such things as muppet boots.
I think the cool kids in high school still needed some way to feel superior after graduation day, and they weren’t doing it with success or money, so they stuck with clothing.
Fashion is about lots of things- particularly conspicuous consumption, social status/position, and image. Both sexes play the game. You dress in a way that reflects your aspirations, interests, and perceived self-image. You dress the way you do to tell the world you’re college educated/hipster/blue-collar/fashionista/conservative/obsessed with exercise/artsy/successful businessperson/hippie. It’s a way of easily signaling who you are. In our culture women and adolescents are more comfortable playing around with their projected image than men tend to be.
This is not to say that everyone spends hours agonising over dress choices. In my experience, we tend to gravitate towards clothes that project whatever image we feel is most us. It’s a question of emotional comfort and conformity to one’s scoial group.
To add a data point: I work in a field that is neither male nor female dominated, at a company that doesn’t have a dress code to speak of. I am not a fashionable dresser but I do have a personal and somewhat quirky sense of style. I would say however that 80% of the women who work in my department are dressing for comfort and professionalism first, relatively flattering clothing next, and fashion last of all. The other 20% probably split 50-50 between the quirkies like me, and the ultra-fashionable. These statistics are of course purely unscientific and off the top of my head from observing the women at work.
Nevertheless, I would say that most of us are trying to look nice, just that fashion doesn’t seem to factor into what we’re defining nice as. I see a lot of shirt-waist dresses, long jumper dresses, and pantsuity sorts of things. Not precisely cutting edge.
I don’t know if you can theorize from that who these women might be dressing for. I, personally, dress to please myself first - mostly from long experience that I cannot quite hit the fashion note - I’m always just a shade off key in some way. It’s like being tone-deaf to fashion. So I gave up on that long ago.
If you look at a book of fashions (of the last 1000 years) you will notice that things have pretty much fossilized since about 1900. Men’s suits are essntially unchanged from that era…and women (except for the shorter skirts) dress pretty much the same. Going back, if you compare the styles of 1400 with 1500, you see tremendous differences. Take the clothing of the high renaissance…fur-lines capes, hats of all sizes and shapes, garish colors, etc. By contrast, our fashions of today are pretty staid and sober. Any chance this will change?
Oh certainly. Diamonds may be the greatest example of effective marketing the world has ever seen.
But you buy diamonds for your lady. She knows they are real and thus, according to her constructed viewpoint she has received the message that you love her. But why does she wear them? I mean, it’s true that they often do make a very aesthetically effective fashion accessory. But when I ask the people I know who buy into this viewpoint they almost always throw in (in addition to it being a symbol of love or just remarking how stunningly beautiful it is) something about displaying a level of status in relation to other women.
I guess there is something I find fascinating about that.
It’s also an important part of the mating ritual…a ritual that is locally controlled per social norms for that area. You can find pockets here and there in America where 1980s Big Hair is still all the rage. That is the fashion that will catch you a mate in that area.
That’s pretty much it. In fact, my various circles of friends of the years are so conscious about dressing to fit into social norms for our peer group that we all end up wearing the exact same thing on a number of occassions. At work, we’ve noticed that so many of us wear the same outfits that as a joke we had the entire department wear the same outfit on the same day. It really freaked some people out.
If it means wearing clothing that is similar to that of other members of a peer group so that one will fit in, I think that males are much more fashion conscious than females, and what’s more, it starts very early. I’ve seen 1st grade boys who felt they had to dress like clones of each other, and the gang chic clothing is firmly entrenched by the time they reach about 5th grade.
Women, in my experience, and I fall firmly into this camp, when dressing to go out, dress primarily based on how what they’re wearing makes them feel. I don’t want to feel out of place by being too dressy or too casual, but I want to always feel feminine. The feeling of fitting in or feeling sexy or feminine, or whatever the goal is, is highly dependant upon how others percieve us, and getting appreciative looks and compliments from either sex can produce or enhance that feeling, but IMO, it is the feeling that is the goal, and not the effect produced in others. This is why we’ll wear matching fancy lingerie under our clothes when we want to feel sexy, even if nobody is ever going to see it.
This is why many women have to pass the mirror test before going out. We need to feel that we live up to the standards we’ve set for ourselves.
“Fashion” in the sense of wearing what some group of elite designers in Paris and New York decide is “in” this year completely escapes me.
I think the vast majority of women dress for a combination of comfort and to look good as is appropriate for the situation. For me, the balance comes down slightly on the side of appearance. I’ll choose attractive over physical comfort quite often because it makes me feel good to have that sense of looking good.
