{"id":182,"date":"2009-06-11T21:25:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-11T21:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2009\/06\/11\/182\/"},"modified":"2010-05-15T14:57:34","modified_gmt":"2010-05-15T19:57:34","slug":"182","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=182","title":{"rendered":"The Chaos of Fashion"},"content":{"rendered":"

The NY Times had an interesting little article<\/a> today on a fashion trend developing in the eyewear field. For the past 5 or 6 years, square and narrow glasses have been the accepted \u201cthing to wear\u201d. But now that’s shifting towards small round frames. <\/p>\n

I myself, being a long-time wearer of glasses, liked the big oval frames that were once popular (and which are still a long way from making a comeback). They provided a wide, uninterrupted vision field, as well as maximum protection against stray objects flung in the direction of your face. And they were stable and comfortable on your nose. I kept wearing my old ovals until about 3 years ago, when I finally capitulated to the current style. Economist Robert Samuelson<\/a>, who in my opinion says a lot of cogent things about the current economic situation (not the constant pessimism of Nouriel Roubini, but certainly realistic about the dangers and painful adjustments that we face), is brave enough to stick with the old style. Now there’s a guy I can admire.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the Times article asked a question (but didn’t answer it) that I’ve often wondered about \u2013 i.e., just how does a change in fashion trend come about? Just who or what started the change in what fashion merchants offer and what their customers want to buy? The article tried to trace out some precedents and possible influences behind the current shift towards round frames \u2013 including the late John Lennon and the legendary Harry Potter. But it really didn’t give a good explanation as to how or where this little fashion storm formed.<\/p>\n

I used the \u201cstorm\u201d metaphor quite intentionally, as it links the phenomenon of fashion to modern studies of complex system dynamics (including chaos theory, self-organization, and complexity \/ emergence from non-centralized populations of many independent participants). The formation of a weather storm, such as a hurricane or tornado, can be expected but cannot be predicted. The dynamics behind such storms are too complex. They just seem to happen when there’s a lot of \u201cenergy in the atmosphere\u201d, and they last for a while until they finally play themselves out and dissipate. Although their birth and life-path cannot be accurately forecast, and each one is unique, certain patterns and trends about them are apparent. Much the same as with fashion trends.<\/p>\n

Fashion trends are probably subject to the \u201cbutterfly\u201d effect. One of the most popular notions about chaos theory is that in a highly recursive non-linear system such as the weather, the tiny effect of a butterfly flapping in the right place at the right time can cause a hurricane to form. Of course, not every butterfly sets off a hurricane; the world would be decimated if that were the case! But a tiny little force at just the right place usually does set the big things in motion. Another analogy \u2013 if you slowly drop grains of sand on a sandpile, at some point a landslide will form. Just why does one particular grain set off a landslide event, when thousands of others just settled onto the pile without any noticeable impact?<\/p>\n

These tiny little things generally cannot be tracked; you can’t work backwards from a hurricane and find the butterfly or the island native waving a palm leaf that put just he right little swirl in the air at a high-energy moment, which somehow kept on building and building. Just as the NY Times could not trace back to the little conversation or little prank that got a group interested in round glasses, a group that somehow started a trend. Some little thing happened in the right environment at the right time \u2013 e.g. young people were getting bored with thin rectangle glasses, they were ready for a new trend. And thus, round glasses seem to be the \u201cnext wave\u201d in eyeglass fashion. (Waves too can be considered a self-organized phenomenon in a literal \u201csea of chaos\u201d). <\/p>\n

(Perhaps some young person found in the attic an old pair of hippie glasses that their mother or father had worn many years ago; just for a laugh, they went out with their friends wearing them. Unexpectedly, the friends liked the look, and thus started digging up old glasses of their own from their parents. And it just kept on going, until some shopkeeper noticed that people were coming in looking for round glasses again, etc. etc.) <\/p>\n

Chaos concepts are popular amidst economists, and will probably be used by them to help explain how the housing bubble burst and how our financial system collapsed, triggering the most serious economic turndown in over fifty years. I hope that Robert Samuelson will be writing a lot about it \u2013 while wearing his non-fashionable oval glasses. Now there’s a guy able to rise above the chaos of fashionable thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The NY Times had an interesting little article today on a fashion trend developing in the eyewear field. For the past 5 or 6 years, square and narrow glasses have been the accepted \u201cthing to wear\u201d. But now that’s shifting towards small round frames. I myself, being a long-time wearer of glasses, liked the big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1556,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions\/1556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}