a random growl about fashion

[silverflight8]

One thing that both fascinates and annoys me about fashion and the perception of what is cool is the way fashion is related to ingroup/outgroup, exclusivity, signalling, etc. This intersects in a predictable but still weird way with money and the price of things. Which is a pretentious way of saying that the thing that you use as normal, workaday, cheap/reasonably priced things today, which you bought because they are reasonably priced for the usable value you get out of it, may blow up eventually into expensive fashion items in the future. Including for people who will never use the object for its original use! For me this is most evident in watches, which I approach from the outside and which have a jewelery/collector/wealth signalling aspect to (and which has very high ceilings in price + the actual time-telling is superseded for most people by other tools). Getting a watch that tells time accurately and is waterproof is fairly inexpensive. Quartz watches are very accurate and stay synced for a long time as long as you don't require GPS-levels of coordination, watch batteries are not expensive, mass manufacture drives down the price hugely, the materials can be strong, durable and waterproof quite cheaply. But there's expensive watches that are designed to look like or imitate what were once workaday timepieces, but because aviators/divers/whathaveyou in this era looked cool and manly, that's something to emulate visually today, at a much higher price point. It's a marketing thing, where you look beyond selling an object for the practical use (tell time) and sell an aspiration, or an object that props up the perception of yourself. Or look at fountain pens. Undoubtedly even when they were daily items, there were still some people who bought super expensive ones, but now the proportion of people who buy the high end kinds is much higher, because the bulk of the people who just wanted "cheap reliable writing implement" switched over to ballpoints. But fountain pens have this upper segment of people who are really, really, really into them, and are willing to fork over thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. There are very usable and nice fountain pens for under ten dollars, too. Some of the expensive ones look pretty much like any regular pen someone might have used in 1920, without being encrusted in diamonds or some other expensive material. Just emulation. It's the triple whammy for me: wanting to emulate something in the past, the emulation being fashion only, and paying very high prices for it.

It makes me wonder what things I own or do today which, given 50 or 100 years' distance and nostalgic (or historical) gloss, will look cool and historical. My binoculars which are expensive (but proportionate to their cost of manufacture)? The mirrorless camera - I mean, these days film cameras are now worshipped by a tiny fraction of people who are extremely into them, and are expensive to get, and I'm literally seeing this happen now with cheap digital point-and-shoots from the 2000s - will the shortcomings I currently find about it glamourized? What about my work, or the tools I use for them? The workhorse laptop which is sturdy but might become emblematic of $industryin2020s era nostalgic? Will people 100 years from now all get laser eye surgery and glasses become worn with clear glass to look like people like me? It's weird to think about!

Comments

[spiralsheep]

My favoured 1980s digital watch is still produced today and has become best known not as a style icon, because it's cheap, but because its cheapness and reliability means it's the model known for being used by terrorists.

I bonded over this fact and our mutual choice of watch with a (posh) man in a pub, lol.

[silverflight8]

Lmao you know it's reliable when terrorists use them 🤣

[eustacia_vye28]

I wonder if it's all a sense of nostalgia, too. Because most things made nowadays suck in quality and construction, and fast fashion is terrible. so if a manufacturer evokes the nostalgia, they'll get the Gen X people buying into it, and other people thinking it's a better quality than it is.

[silverflight8]

Yeah hearkening back to those days (+ some survivorship bias - the ones you see around now, which you associate with quality, are only around BECAUSE they were quality).