There's fashion and there's couture. Couture is a positional good. Looking nice is a public good. Wouldn't it be loverly if all the guys and gals on the streets were dressed to kill? It wouldn't have the "I can afford this and you can't" effect anymore, although with the advent of eBay that is no longer true, I own a Bijan suit that cost $12.5K new, apparently these are commissioned by billionaires and worn once, but I got on it eBay for less than I've paid for a perfectly nice Brooks Brothers suit at considerable less than a tenth of the price, and boy, is it a nice suit. (Better be.) You do not have to spend $4,500 at Bergdorf Goodman to get an Armani Black Label suit; with a little patience you can get one for $69.00 + 8.00 shipping on eBay Word, guys! Nonetheless the spread of style would promote the "everybody looks good and feels nice in their clothes" effect, enhancing the overall aesthetic value of the experience of being on the street and raising the public mood.
Back in the day, good Soviet orchestras toured the provinces. This kind of reduced the snob value of classical music (not a bad thing), but made good classical music widely available to the "masses," enhancing their lived experience. I'd say the tradeoff was worth it.
Once more point along these lines. One of the great English Communists. William Morris, made his living as a very high end designer of wallpapers, fabrics, hand-pressed books (go the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and drool over the Kellmscott Chaucer that he did) and other finely done very expensive decorative arts. One of the main criticisms he had of capitalism was that it degraded the living environment by replacing relatively good artisanal stuff with mass produced shoddy. In a way one of his major objections to capitalism was that it made everything cheap and ugly. He imagined a world where a lot more of what we used would be produced by skilled artisans. He may have over-romanticized the medieval craft tradition and been over-optimistic about the possibilities of making the world and the lived environment, including the lived-in environment, clothes and houses, more beautiful. But it's a goal.
So, viva Versace! hurray for Hermes! Great for Gucci! Drink to Dolce! Style for the masses! And I refuse to apologize.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Dec 14, 2007, at 5:44 PM, andie nachgeborenen
> wrote:
>
> > As (I think it was) Aneurin Bevan said, nothing is
> too
> > good for the working class. Why shouldn't the
> > proletariat wear Prada? Who gave the Devil a
> monopoly
> > on fine clothes? Fuck the Mao suit and the jeans,
> > Vuitton for all!
>
> I'm all for that but a lot of the appeal of fashion
> is as a
> positional good - if the masses had it, it'd be no
> fun anymore.
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