Fashion
Year: 1893
Type: article
Abstract: ically and politically, it ought, so that as early as the days of Elizabeth 'from the towne to WTestminster alonge, every Streate' was full of French and 'Millen ' shops displaying goods 'able to make any temperate man to gase on them and to buy somewhat, though it serve to no purpose necessarie.' 1 There was besides at the other end of the balance a dexterous State policy exploiting this British weakness and using its own creative and purveying skill to ends of aggrandisement.2Hence in early economic theory the dynamic of wants and tastes, even wAThen belief in paternal State functions waned, was not likely to be neglected.Peace, steam and factory, proletariat and means of subsistence, diverted attention to production and population.But the working man has been for some time asserting that he is not a machine, but has tastes and likes to be in the fashion, even though fashion may turn and rend him as it abandons his employer's business.3He too is a consumer, 'temperate,' it may be, yet apt 'to gase and to buy somewhat,' and influence the fluctuations in demand.There is rno further excuse for neglecting a thoroughgoing examination of those fluctuations.Nevertheless that factor in these movements, which, if it is not the most potent, is at least the most characteristic and typical of all, inasmuch as it is the expression of the very spirit and instinct of variability itself, receives never more than a sentence or a paragraph of consideration in modern economic treatises.Mill, Cairnes and Fawcett do not condescend to the economics of fashion; and yet the last was of opinion that 'in political -economy, as in many other sciences, the causes which produce *disturbing fluctuations require a more careful investigation than those causes whose action is more constant and more undeviating.'4 Cournot believed that all human societies were tending towards a final, stable, persisting order, and that the effectual regulating .ofevery demand was to hasten the blessed time when history should be no more, because we should all live according to scientific laws; 5 but it does not appear that he coped with the regulation of fashion.Thorold Rogers only alluded to the ' unintelligible fickleness' of fashion to groan and pass by.6 Of living 1 A Compendious or Brief Examination of certain ordinary complaints, by W. S.
Source: The Economic Journal
DOI: 10.2307/2955695
Author: Caroline A. Foley
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4241538306