Trends are fashions seen as fashionable for a short time. They tend to fade and are replaced by other fashions that become “the” fashion for a specific time. What is fashion? A fashion is exerting the effort or resources to create and reproduce a fashion quickly. What is lacking in a fashion trend is Creative or outsized vision, and an absence of a viable, secure, and feasible alternative. In a crisis, a fashion usually turns into a Hobo or tagalong.
The trend of the decade in the sixties was for nonconformity, or what we could call windows of self-expression. It was centered on youth, androgyny, and rebellion. It was youthful, witty, creative, and began exactly as the Industrial Revolution advanced to the individual and the family. The subculture of the 1962’s was counterculture. And the culture of the 1960s was in turn, counterculture. People began to accumulate information and find it in order to expound on their discoveries.
Traditional fashion and sophistication are for Hunterovski Jewelry boxes, watches, ties, belts, men’s shirts, caps, ties, body stockings, tights, skirts, blouses, and boy’s robes. Most recently, the collapse of the US economy and the near-collapse of the global financial system has made the consumers more price-conscious. As a result, people are buying less and selling more. This has the effect of reducing the number of goods supplied because fewer goods need to be produced. Hence, competition increases, and the consumer benefits, with superior real-world bargains.
The advent of the Internet means that a vast amount of sales and purchases can be made faster, easier, and more cheaply. The buying and selling of goods on the Internet reduction the physical capacity of sellers to sell (which is shifted to the point of being merely storage for files and minutes–the lowest common consumption is in fact only a small fraction of the functions performed). Hence the effect is the opposite of increasing the capacity to sell — large volumes of sales, like traditional goods, are still difficult to match– the end product sells a mile long.
The recent trend in economic downturns is for people to try to Rihanna on for size. Rihanna has mastered the art of taking up and detesting the fashion trends assumed to be conventional, while at the same time combining them with items normally seen only on the runway– in this way Rihanna gets away with expensive counterfeits because–the counterfeits actually perform the function of filling the gap between the Rihanna norm and what would otherwise be spent on a regular basis– and because of their high price they actually make the Rihanna look a bit less conventional while still belonging to the prevailing model.
Fake Fashion and the Need for Information
Manufacturing and selling fake fashion has nothing to do with material secretly being manufactured somewhere; everything instead has to do with the rampant unofficial access to all information. Theoretically, it is easy to lie about the source of a product–Who makes it, where it was made, who manufactured it– all that information is freely available to the willing seller. However, even this is oftentimes not possible, because it may concern highly competitive secrets that can lead to direct losses.
Some unscrupulous sellers literally have their own sources of information. They are able to provide false details of the fake goods to sophisticated manufacturers, including the packaging, measurements, and even the labeling of the counterfeit product. They then pass off the material as genuine, even when it is not.
