Fashion and shopping psychology

Go to any shopping centre or mall and you will see large numbers of women going into and out of every shop in turn. They will pick up and replace countless items, perhaps try on a few skirts, or tops, run through the shoes, hold a few items up, then move on. Smaller numbers of men do the same. Occasionally they will buy something. But what exactly are they doing? Is it simply shopping, buying goods that are needed?

Of course, an anthropologist would have a field day searching out cultural symbols, learned behaviours, rituals and rites. But even the untrained eye can see that something more than just buying goods is going on.

It is culturally important for many women to know what is on offer in the shops. They need to know what styles are being presented, what fashions are "in" and which ones are "out", what colours predominate this year compared to last year, and what they need to buy in order to be seen to be up-to-date.

Cataloguing shops

The link between needing and buying is effectively replaced by a cultural requirement to keep up-to-date with changes in the clothing market. So instead of looking at a pair of shoes to see if they are still usable, the customer looks at the pair of shoes to see if they are still current.

Instead of shoes becoming "old" because they are worn out, they become "old" only because the market has declared them to be "out-of-date". Who decides what is out-of-date? Well the marketers of course. They have an additional control over the level of demand because they prompt a renewal of the products simply by declaring a fashion change.

Taste and style, or just consumerism?

In the same way, women are encouraged to believe that they have a heightened sense of style, of fashion, of colour, and what "goes well" with other things. Whether or not this is generally the case is a moot point as can clearly be seen on any busy shopping day. The variety of matching and unmatching clothing on display shows just how variable this sense of fashion and colour really is.

But the belief is inculcated, that women need to express their fashion judgement, updating their wardrobe regularly, replacing shoes frequently to "match" the other items bought. And this sort of conditioning, whilst hugely beneficial for the market, encourages a vast waste in the sale and use of clothing. And it takes a lot of time to catalogue shops, taking note of what is in and out.

If the same approach was applied to say, white goods, there would be an international outcry. How reasonable would it seem to suddenly declare the toaster to be "old" when it is still working perfectly well? Built-in obsolescence pales into insignificance in comparison to the speed at which female clothing is expected to change. Even the fashion for changing mobile phones, which typically boast increased functionality with each generation, can't compete with the speed of shoe sales.

Individual fashion or following the trend?

Of course, there's something very positive and self-affirming about experimenting with new looks, new clothes, new shoes. And the marketers encourage this sense of fun, the throw-away nature of clothes enabling a rapid change of look throughout the year. But the choice that seems so apparent in advertisements is actually a significant social pressure to conform to a market and one increasingly based on cheap foreign labour. Branded clothing is often produced by people who could never afford to buy it.

There is an economic and social cost to the pressure particularly on women to conform to a predefined dress code which is changed to coincide with the interests of the clothes business. What kind of choice is it that insists you have to change constantly, that subtly rejects options not presented in the latest fashion range?

And what a flowering of creativity there would be if people could actually choose their own fashions, explore changing their appearance with a sense of fun and individuality, without being bound to the routine cataloguing of clothes shops, the inevitable conformity to fashion determined by market needs. It wouldn't suit the fashion industry, but it would develop individual creativity and give rise to a broader range of expression.

If more people could free themselves from the need to display a particular logo, to buy a particular brand, to routinely throw away perfectly good clothes and shoes every few months, a mountain of waste could be reduced at the same time as encouraging individual expression and creativity.