https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste Style Advice for Fashion Lovers en-US Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:11:29 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/search.php https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268970 Mon, 27 Jun 2022 19:20:02 +0000 Anonymous 2268970@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Interesting read! Most years I can find some trends every season that interest me, but it's getting less and less lately. Is anyone really buying that much anymore to justify Shein levels of production? Sounds like just a lot of waste :/ </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268953 Mon, 27 Jun 2022 17:46:11 +0000 MsMaven 2268953@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Thanks for posting, UmmLila, because I would have missed this. Just a couple of days ago I was thinking about American Bandstand and how we’d&nbsp;critique the girls’ clothes, not realizing that they were the fashion vanguard and we, out west, were two years behind.&nbsp;<div><br /></div><div>And I do remember that there was much more pressure to conform in buying and wearing fashion in my high school days. (Postponed reunion coming up.)&nbsp;</p> <p>I’ve complained a lot about the decline in quality of favorite brands. This helps to understand how it happened.</div> </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268941 Mon, 27 Jun 2022 17:24:59 +0000 Suz 2268941@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>One gets the sense that this court would favour any item of clothing that hampered women's freedom of movement...</p> <p>I read the article and like <b>Carla</b>, missed posting it to Link Love. The ubiquity of certain trends does seem more common since the advent of fast fashion, but that is partly because people buy more and replace more of their wardrobes more often, I'm betting.&nbsp; </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268852 Mon, 27 Jun 2022 03:00:34 +0000 Bijou 2268852@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>An interesting read and awareness to not fall for the hype is Step 1. Jenn made a very interesting comment last year of only buying items that were above a price point to counteract a disposable mentality that resonated with me. I don't want to be on the churn and burn merry-go-round. </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268849 Mon, 27 Jun 2022 01:29:40 +0000 Sal 2268849@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>I have been thinking about the article - there is a lot to take in.</p> <p>I do agree that trends have been ubiquitous for a while - my Mum complained that in the 60s she struggled to find colours to suit her autumnal colouring.&nbsp; She was all set in the 70s though!&nbsp; And I think we have all struggled with periods when the prevalent styles are not our thing.&nbsp; That's what brought me to YLF!</p> <p>I think the sheer speed and wastage now is the main issue.&nbsp; The $15 dress probably doesn't get a second life after being worn once.</p> <p>I think trends and fashion can be a lot of fun though - it's buying into the ones that have longevity for you at the right pace.&nbsp; Easier said than done! </p> <p></p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268837 Mon, 27 Jun 2022 00:23:03 +0000 SarahD8 2268837@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>"not only do lots of companies end up making garments that look very much alike, but for efficiency’s sake, they’re also often the same garments those companies made in past seasons, gussied up with new details."</p> <p>This seems...good, actually? Given the diversity of bodies we all have different lists of retailers that work or don't work for us and it's really frustrating when a retailer that was formerly a reliable standby changes its fit model or whatever and the clothes no longer work. I myself have at least 4 versions of the same J Crew pintuck popover bought in different years. I know what size to order, I know how to incorporate it into outfits -- it's fantastic. Yes, it's great to do something new with one's style now and then but it's also nice to have reliable old standards -- it's a balance. </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268749 Sun, 26 Jun 2022 01:31:25 +0000 Jaime 2268749@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Lots of thought provoking stuff. I also read this article and gave it side eye. On the one hand, yes I it does offer some explanation as to why there are puffy sleeves everywhere, but, as nicely pointed out above, fashion has been dictating what we find in stores for a very long time. I have read other articles about how there has never been so many styles of jeans available at retail at one time.&nbsp;<br />I can't even start about the clothes representing the clothes of orthodox Jews. I have never seen any of my orthodox, modest dressing, relatives dressing in anything remotely like her dresses. I have nothing against the look per se, although it is not for me in most iterations, but it is not new or exclusive to any one community.</p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268747 Sun, 26 Jun 2022 00:33:52 +0000 Sloper 2268747@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>I’m also in a sad bad mood so I guess it is spilling over into my thoughts on this article.</p> <p>It does always tickle me that people (the writer) are always so “shocked shocked” that the business of business is….business. &nbsp;Capitalizing on trends, selling things and making money - who’d a thunk it?</p> <p>I guess she is too young to remember Mary Quant’s mini skirts or YSL’s shift dresses and safari jackets. &nbsp;How many of us lived through years of bell bottoms, or prairie dresses, or wrung our hands over too too many skinny jeans. &nbsp;In any case, please google Gunne Sax images ;-)</p> <p>oh well. </p> <p>ETA - I’ll also disagree that these (Batsheva) are the clothes of religious fundamentalism.</p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268742 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 20:49:03 +0000 April 2268742@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>I read it too and know that LMA would agree 100% with the idea that "once you take the designer out of the equation, you get a whole lotta same same same same."&nbsp; </p> <p>He's a graphic designer and not a fashion designer, but in some ways design is design.</p> <p> </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268734 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 19:38:51 +0000 rachylou 2268734@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Well that’s interesting. Good article. I don’t know. Does that mean Shein is not as bad as it would seem? If it’s direct from factories… if they run up a possibility, slap it on the web, get orders and THEN start churning out the clothes… that’s less dead weight inventory, makes 7000 items a day seem more real… and in a way equals more individuality for customers… because what’s the chance you’ll lock on to something someone saw yesterday?</p> <p>However, creativity I can see losing out because unappealing ideas that could become appealing get squashed right away. Less chance of anything sneaking out. The question of ‘can I sell it’ comes before ‘what I could do?’</p> <p>I will say this: I see a lot of things from designer brands now that don’t look sufficiently different in either style or quality from what I see in Target. I did think the Batsheva dresses were different and I’d have bought one if they hadn’t stop making what I liked before I’d even caught on. </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268732 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 19:01:50 +0000 Angie 2268732@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Great article!</p> <p>"Bringing back old garments with new details is among the oldest tricks in the apparel book"</p> <p>That is SOOOOO TRUE. We finished watching All Creatures Great And Small - which I highly reccommend for animal lovers. James Herriot fans too - and my point is that the 1930's dresses in the show are fashionable RIGHT NOW. So are the cardigans. Only we wear them differently today. </p> <p>When I think too much about it and am very much in my head, I end up with these thoughts:</p> <ul> <li>Nothing in fashion is new - apart from fabric technology/manufacture, how items are combined in outfits, and hairstyles.</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Broadly speaking most items are some type of modern classic or iconic classic. Is that because we've seen them before? Don't know. I go around in circles in my head.</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Anything goes, nothing is dated. Items and looks have their fashion moment and therefore become trendy, but they are not new. It all comes back again. It's on trend to wear what you like from any fashion era! </li> </ul> And sometimes I find these thoughts extreme ;)</p> <p>Personally, I enjoy revisiting looks I loved and wore decades ago. I'm very sentimental and nostalgic, and embrace those feelings. It's fun too! So I'm glad that fashion repeats itself. I also love classics and iconic classics in white, navy, and brights. I can always find a classic to love. </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268728 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 17:13:52 +0000 kkards 2268728@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Vildy- The Breck Girl-oh how I longed to be her. lol, I was the drab brown haired girl in a sea of blondes and red heads. Or at least that’s how I remember it.</p> <p>Runcarla soooo much plaid! &amp; I forgot about the family makeovers. Yes loved that. </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268726 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 16:52:28 +0000 Carla 2268726@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>@ kkards - I&nbsp;<i>loved&nbsp;</i>the September issue of Seventeen magazine! &nbsp;To this day I <i>still&nbsp;</i>have a glass of orange juice when I have a peanut butter cookie (the kind with the design from forks pressed criss cross) because it was suggested in the magazine as a good after school snack! &nbsp;My eldest son likes the combination too, after I introduced it to him! &nbsp;One of my favourite editions was the ‘makeover’ of 5 girls/women all from the same family. &nbsp;I remember nice haircuts, and lots of plaid (I think!) </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268722 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 16:33:32 +0000 Anonymous 2268722@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Puffy sleeves and pioneer dresses seem so insignificant compared to our constitutional rights being taken away. &nbsp;I wonder what they’ll go after next? &nbsp;</p> <p>Thanks for the article and post, UmmLila, it is very thought-provoking! &nbsp;That last paragraph really hit home for me.</p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268721 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 15:41:33 +0000 slim cat 2268721@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>It was happening before and it's worse now for sure. I shop less now than before - some of it because of fabrics ( natural fabrication is more expensive and less likely to be used ), some - because of being sized out of some brands and mostly because pieces are not appealing to me at all ( cottage core and such ). I hope some of fast fashion just go away or at least get slower ( wishful thinking ).<br />The ruling is devastating. </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268720 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 15:28:28 +0000 cat2 2268720@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Thanks for the explanation. It explains how trends get so completely worn out. I have a tweed moto jacket because that was where the moto trend crossed with something I actually like - tweed. But in no sane universe would someone say let’s make tweed motos and have it start a trend, it’s just how the trend gets watered down until eventually everyone has succumbed. </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268718 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 14:54:51 +0000 Janet 2268718@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Great piece. I’m more and more skeptical of trend and more assured in my own preferences with each year, and it’s a good thing as I’m now pushing 60 and can’t even begin to carry the trends the way a young/slim woman can. It just looks silly on me.</p> <p>And thank you for acknowledging the ruling that plunged me into fury and despair all day yesterday. I’m trying to rally my energy today, but it’s not easy. </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268717 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 14:51:39 +0000 Vildy 2268717@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>kkards, the girl chosen from my school was teased by a male teacher of our class as The Breck Girl. Do you remember those ads? Paintings. Every hair behaved.&nbsp; This girl had an ash blonde bubble flip.&nbsp; And she was tall but not gangly.&nbsp; So, "perfect" in every way.&nbsp; And also the parents are connected so certain girls were invited to a home selling party for wonderbras or their predecessors, to visit American Bandstand, or to join the junior auxiliary of the women's club,&nbsp; It stirkes me now that every one of these activities was something you had to be invited to do and there was no way to ask/apply.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>Because this girl and I had many of the same college prep classes, she often sat behind me owing to alphabetical seating.&nbsp; I had a favorite lightweight reversible rain coat that was a dappled burnt orange small floral on one side and a plain sage green on the other.&nbsp; My mother bought it for me and was always trying to curb my liking for lifeless colors and prints :D&nbsp; and was mystified that I preferred to wear it on the green side.&nbsp; I would throw it over my desk chair back.&nbsp; The girl started joke complaining to me about it and saying how much she hated that coat and wished I would get rid of it.&nbsp; One day my locker was broken into - and this never happened at my school - and I "knew" she and her buddy had done it because the only thing missing was my coat.&nbsp;</p> <p> </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268716 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 14:40:33 +0000 JAileen 2268716@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Puffed sleeves really are everywhere. &nbsp;I almost bought a rugby shirt in interesting colors, but then I noticed it had puffed sleeves. &nbsp;I’m not against puffed sleeves per se. &nbsp;I’m against them on me.</p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268714 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 14:14:09 +0000 kkards 2268714@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Vildy, I don’t remember knowing anyone who was actually on the board, but I remember wanting to be. But they were all those girls with the perfect hair and the perfect teeth, and i was the girl who was constantly experimenting with my hair and not always getting it right, and braces. What i do remember was a sign/poster with their pictures and something to the the affect of “this year for back to school, I’m buying X and wearing it with Y”.&nbsp; </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268711 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 14:08:05 +0000 Vildy 2268711@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Ooh, those teen "advisory" boards.&nbsp; A girl in my high school was chosen for this at the then only old line department store and I was so envious.&nbsp; Imagine being anointed like that. :D&nbsp; Later I found out that what it actually consisted of was low-wage part-time mandatory sales floor work and literally nothing else.&nbsp; </p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268710 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 13:59:38 +0000 kkards 2268710@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>I read this, but I’m not as convinced as the author that this is a new phenomenon. That its bigger and faster than in the past, yes, but not new. I feel like if anything, the new environment gives us more freedoms to dress in ways that make us, us.&nbsp;</p> <p><i>At a certain point, you are not really paying for a product, but for the hopeful experience of buying something new<br /></i>And yes, I believe this is true, but i remember getting so excited each year when the back to school Sears catalog came, and than later the September issue of Seventeen magazine. Same thing as what the author is describing and meant to drive the same aspirational feelings as todays marketing. I also remember the local department store had a teen advisory board, which if you think about it, has a direct line to todays “influencers”.&nbsp;</p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268709 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 13:48:12 +0000 Vildy 2268709@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>I don't remember the original article I read about Hay's designs years ago but I do remember it had quotes about her rationale that really irked me. It had the feeling of her showing how the Orthodox women could/should be doing it better.&nbsp; In this article I just found, I can see how she arrived at that perspective since both she and her husband never grew up in that community and she had an outsider perspective, which she kept.&nbsp;<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.townandcountrymag.com/style/fashion-trends/a38199995/batsheva-hay-alexei-hay-family-portrait/">https://www.townandcountrymag......amily-port</a></p> <p>As someone whose extended family does live in that community, I know they didn't dress like this and are just ordinarily stylish, while adhering to modest dress.&nbsp; They certainly are not covering up their "shameful" bodies, as she says. Nor going about their days fishing for the compliments Hay says spawned her look.&nbsp; Though these days, with the market flooded with these puffy sleeved prairie dresses, maybe they too are finally wearing them.&nbsp; </p> <p>ETA:&nbsp; according to the town and country article, Hay herself *is*&nbsp; one of those&nbsp; "</p> <p>weird New York fashion-and-art girls"</p> <p></p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268707 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 12:39:24 +0000 Carla 2268707@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>Ha! &nbsp;I read this, but missed sending it to Inge for ‘Links Love’ by 24 hours. &nbsp; </p> <p>Its really up to us as individuals to see past all the intense marketing in all its forms to determine our own personal style and acquire items of a style, type and quality (and at a rate) that works personally. &nbsp;</p> https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/fashion-has-abandoned-human-taste#post-2268706 Sat, 25 Jun 2022 12:36:35 +0000 UmmLila (Lisa) 2268706@https://youlookfab.com/welookfab/ <p>and the Supreme Court has abandoned women's rights ... but I suppose that is off topic. I've written my letters, made my donations.</p> <p>The below goes to Angie's recent post on puffy sleeves:<br />&lt;<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/06/fast-fashion-trends-industry-mass-market-consumption/661371/?utm_source=copy-link&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=share">https://www.theatlantic.com/te.....arket-cons</a>&gt;</p> <p>As best as I can tell, the puff-sleeve onslaught began in 2018. The clothing designer Batsheva Hay’s eponymous brand was barely two years old, but her high-necked, ruffle-trimmed, elbow-covering dresses in dense florals and upholstery prints—bizarro-world reimaginings of the conservative frocks favored by Hasidic Jewish women and the Amish—had <a rel="nofollow" href="https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/bjp9vq/batsheva-dress">developed a cult following</a> among weird New York fashion-and-art girls<i>.</i> Almost all of her early designs featured some kind of huge, puffy sleeve; according to a <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/10/batsheva-hay-rethinks-the-traditions-of-feminine-dress">lengthy profile in <i>The</i> <i>New Yorker</i></a> published that September, the custom-made dress that inspired Hay’s line had enough space in the shoulders to store a few tennis balls.</p> <p>Batsheva dresses aren’t for everyone. They can cost more than $400, first of all, and more important, they’re weird: When paired with Jordans and decontextualized on a 20-something Instagram babe, the clothes of religious fundamentalism become purposefully unsettling. But as described in that <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL-KQij0I8I">cerulean-sweater scene</a> from <i>The Devil Wears Prada</i>, what happens at the tip-top of the fashion hierarchy rains down on the rest of us. So it went with the puff sleeve. Batsheva and a handful of other influential indie designers adopted the puff around the same time, and the J.Crews and ASOSes and Old Navys of the world took notice. Puff sleeves filtered down the price tiers, in one form or another, just like a zillion trends have before—streamlined for industrial-grade reproduction and attached to a litany of dresses and shirts that don’t require a model’s body or an heiress’s bank account. And then, unlike most trends, it stuck around.</p> <p>Four years later, the puff sleeve still has its boot firmly on the neck of the American apparel market. If you have tried to buy any women’s clothes this year, you already knew that—the sleeves are everywhere, at every size and price level, most of them stripped of the weirdness that made the originals compelling and ready to make you look like a milkmaid in the most boring way imaginable. At a time when most fashion trends have gotten more ephemeral and less universal because of constant product churn, some manage to achieve the opposite: a ubiquity that feels disconnected from perceptible demand. Right now it’s puff sleeves, but we’ve also seen cold shoulders, peplums, crop tops, pussybows, fanny packs, and shackets—a host of looks that have generated their own aesthetic feedback loops, iterated until the buying public can’t stand them anymore. Americans now have more consumer choice than ever, at least going by the sheer volume of available products, but so much of the clothing that ends up in stores looks uncannily the same.</p> <p>When you take creative decisions out of the hands of actual humans, some funny stuff starts to happen. For most of the 20th century, designing clothes for mass consumption was still dependent in large part on the ideas and creative instincts of individuals, according to Shawn Grain Carter, a professor of fashion business management at the Fashion Institute of Technology and a former retail buyer and product developer. Even most budget-minded clothing retailers had fashion offices that sent people out into the world to see what was going on, both within the industry and in the culture at large, and find compelling ideas that could be alchemized into products for consumers. One of these employees might see some weirdo dressed like a frontier bride at a bar in the East Village and later say in a meeting, “What if we did a couple of pieces with puff sleeves?” Development and design work still involved plenty of unglamorous business concerns—sell-through rates, product mix, seasonal sales projections—but the process relied on human taste and judgment. Designers were more likely to be able to take calculated risks.</p> <p>At the end of the 1990s, things in fashion started to change. Conglomeration accelerated within the industry, and companies that had once been independent businesses with creative autonomy began to consolidate, gaining scale while sanding off many of their quirks. Computers and the internet were becoming more central to the work, even on the creative side. Trend-forecasting agencies, long a part of the product-development process for the largest American retailers, began to create more sophisticated data aggregation and analysis techniques, and their services gained wider popularity and deeper influence. As clothing design and trendspotting became more centralized and data-reliant, the liberalization of the global garment trade allowed cheap clothing made in developing countries to pour into the American retail market in unlimited quantities for the first time. That allowed European fast-fashion companies to take a shot at the American consumer market, and in 2000, the Swedish clothing behemoth H&amp;M arrived on the country’s shores.</p> <p>Fast fashion overhauled American shopping and dressing habits in short order. The business model uses cheap materials, low foreign wages, and fast turnaround times to bombard customers with huge numbers of new products, gobbling up market share from slower, more expensive retailers with the promise of constant wardrobe novelty for a nominal fee. Traditional brands, which would commonly plan new collections and develop products for more than a year in advance, couldn’t keep up with competitors that digested trend and sales data and regurgitated new designs in a matter of weeks.</p> <p>Fast fashion has only gotten faster. Shein, a Chinese company that has existed in its current form since 2012, has grown at breakneck speed by marketing the wares of domestic garment factories directly to Western consumers, and by turning around new clothing in just a few days. A 2021 <a rel="nofollow" href="https://restofworld.org/2021/how-shein-beat-amazon-and-reinvented-fast-fashion/">investigation by <i>Rest of World</i></a> found that, over the course of a month, Shein added an average of more than 7,000 new items to its website every day. The company’s success, like that of Spain-based Zara before it, is built on taking the guesswork out of trends: By constantly creating and test-marketing new products, it can measure consumers’ immediate reactions and quickly resupply what sells. That is to say, it can just trawl the internet for anything that shoppers already find vaguely compelling, make a bunch of versions on the cheap, and track responses to them in real time.</p> <p>Doing exactly that has made Shein very successful. The company generates new garments to capitalize on whatever is happening on the internet at any given moment, turning out pastoral frocks to maximize #cottagecore’s <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/02/aesthetics-wiki-cottagecore-tumblr-tiktok/617923/">TikTok virality</a> or cadging the work of independent artists and designers, as the company has repeatedly been accused of doing. To stay afloat, traditional retailers have had to become more like their fast-fashion competition, relying more on data and the advice of large consulting firms and less on the creativity and expertise of their staff. “The days of the designer saying, <i>Look, this is what I’ve done, and this is your choice or forget about it—</i>those days have gone,” Grain Carter told me.</p> <p>When enough brands and retailers begin using these inventory tactics and trend-prediction methods, the results homogenize over time. At the top of the food chain, a designer has an interesting idea, and bigger, more efficient retailers don’t just copy it—they copy one another’s copies. The sameness persists on multiple levels—not only do lots of companies end up making garments that look very much alike, but for efficiency’s sake, they’re also often the same garments those companies made in past seasons, gussied up with new details. That these trend feedback loops often center on sleeves or necklines or trim is no coincidence, according to Grain Carter. Changing a dress’s flutter sleeve to a puff or a blouse’s collar to a pussybow is unlikely to affect the garment’s fit or sizing. Those kinds of changes appeal to customers who want certain parts of their bodies concealed, making the trends marketable to the largest possible audience, across size, age, and income level.</p> <p>Bringing back old garments with new details is among the oldest tricks in the apparel book. But when you optimize that trick to wring every last dollar from it—and do so at the expense of trying out new, unproven ideas—you get a perpetual-motion machine, generating dress after dress that is difficult to distinguish from the ones that came before. Even clothes from different brands will look almost exactly the same; in fact, they might actually <i>be</i> the same. As supply chains have become more dispersed and complicated, multiple brands can end up buying inventories of the same garment, from the same supplier, and putting their own labels in them. You, too, can sometimes buy (and then resell) wholesale quantities of that same garment on AliExpress, a website that aggregates stock from Asian factories for sale to international buyers.</p> <p>The unglamorous realities of production have long been hidden from the public in order to preserve the magic of mass-market consumption. A century ago, this was achieved largely through cathedral-like department stores, but now the sleight of hand is a little different—lavish ad campaigns and sponsorship deals with celebrities and social-media influencers help elevate the vibes of largely dreadful clothing. That’s not just because shopping for clothes has become an ever more internet-centric pursuit. The garments in question, most of which don’t exactly jump off the hanger in person and fit poorly once tried on, benefit from careful photography and liberal photo editing—and from requiring shoppers to pay up front. Not only does this create an extra step between buyers and the realities of modern clothing design and production, but it opens a chasm between buyers and the clothes themselves. At a certain point, you are not really paying for a product, but for the hopeful experience of buying something new. Whatever dress eventually shows up at your house is largely incidental to the momentary rush of acquiring it.</p> <p>For the average shopper, this opacity can magnify the sense that a particular style has become inescapable overnight, largely unbidden. <i>Who asked for all these tops with holes in the sleeves? Were people’s shoulders getting too hot?</i> An idea that would have been moderately popular a few decades ago, before petering out naturally, now sticks around in an endless present, like an unattended record that has begun to skip. Shoppers may encounter the farcical limits of algorithmic selling on a regular basis, but those limits are more plain when Amazon is trying to sell you a second new kitchen faucet, after interpreting your DIY repairs as an indicator of a potential general interest in plumbing fixtures. With clothes, the technology is less obviously stupid, and more insidious. <i>We know you love these shirts, because you’ve already bought three like them. Can we interest you in another?</i> Frequently enough—which may be just one in every 100,000 people who see the product—the answer is yes, and the record skips on.</p> <p>This problem is not limited to fashion. As creative industries become more consolidated and more beholden to producing ever-expanding profits for their shareholders, companies stop taking even calculated risks. You get theaters full of comic-book adaptations and <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/cycles-sequels-spinoffs-remakes-and-reboots/474411/">remakes of past hits</a> instead of movies about adults, for adults. Streaming services fill their libraries with shows meant to play in the background while you scroll your phone. Stores stock up on stuff you might not love, but which the data predict you won’t absolutely hate. “You have too many fashion companies, both on the retail side and the manufacturing side, being driven by empty suits,” Grain Carter said. Consumable products are everywhere, and maybe the most we can hope for is that their persistent joylessness will eventually doom the corporations that foist them upon us.</p> <p> </p>