Myths and Delusions in Fashion

Probably the most fashion magazines and other fashion media get their money from advertisements. Only this fact means that any person should be very careful while listening to their advice. But there is another problem: many media that don’t get money from fashion advertisement still copy facts and recommendations from the paid media. I hope you are more sceptical to any fashion advice now then before, so let’s analyse some of them.

Consider this: when a magazine advises you to change something in your style, clothing or appearance it usually requires some expenses from you. You may need to buy new clothes, new accessories, hair dyes, cosmetics or something else. These industries can’t sell the same products for long periods of time because people become tired of the same things. Also new fashion trends force people to throw out old things and buy new things, or just buy new things without throwing out old ones. Anyway, companies that sell fashion-related products can earn more in case of new trends appearing and in case of growing them more popular.

So when a fashion media advice you to wear a particular kind of clothing, like striped dresses, jeans, black costumes or anything else, usually a big manufacturer of these clothing is sponsoring such media campaigns. Of course other smaller companies would benefit too, they can sell their existing clothing like or imitate goods made by bigger producers.

The same is most likely true for the bleaching hair advice. Brand-name bleaching mixtures are about twenty times more expensive than cheaper ones, which means that brand-name producers have at least 2000% margin on their bleaching products. I imagine they would spend a lot of money in many countries to promote bleaching, fair-haired models, and related fashion trends.

The main problem with fashion trends like I mentioned is that regular people would believe in fashion propaganda and start consider women and men with bleached hair and in black suits more attractive than others. Black suits and bleached hairs would be preferred in interviews due to the halo effect. More people looking like this would appear in movies and TV shows thus strengthening the trends. It would end when every person on Earth would wear a black suit and have bleached hair.

The previous chapter is an example of the slippery slope narrative, made for comic relief.