"New" clothing : meanings and practices

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(1)“NEW” CLOTHING: MEANINGS AND PRACTICES. The Institute of Economics and Social Sciences of Bilkent University by GÖKÇEN COŞKUNER. In Patial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION. in. THE DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT BILKENT UNIVERSITY ANKARA. September 2002.

(2) I certify that I have read this thesis and have found that it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Science in Business Administration.. Assist. Prof. Dr. Özlem Sandıkçı Supervisor I certify that I have read this thesis and have found that it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Science in Business Administration.. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sibel Kalaycıoğlu Examining Committee Member I certify that I have read this thesis and have found that it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Science in Business Administration.. Assist. Prof. Dr. Yavuz Günalay Examining Committee Member. Approval of the Institute of Economics and Social Sciences. Prof. Kürşat Aydoğan Director.

(3) ABSTRACT “NEW” CLOTHING: MEANINGS AND PRACTICES Gökçen Coşkuner Msc., Department of Management Supervisor: Assistant Professor Özlem Sandıkçı August 2002 This thesis explores feelings, experiences and practices related to new clothing. The study seeks to answer three main questions: What does constitute newness of a clothing item? What is the motivation for new clothing purchase? How are the newly purchased garments personalized? Whereas new product literature mostly focuses on technological product categories and discusses tangible attributes as constituents of newness, this study focuses on intangible attributes within a highly symbolic product category; clothing. The research utilizes qualitative research methods and draws upon data collected from 24 informants of different age, gender and cultural capital. The results suggest physical condition, technology, design, fashion and social visibility as constituents of newness for clothing. The motivations for new clothing purchase are two folds: utilitarian and symbolic. Utilitarian motive refers to purchasing new clothing when existing ones are worn, torn, stained or do not fit anymore. Symbolic motives include celebration, power and status, exploration and play and renewal. Informants personalize their new clothing through various practices including knowing and appropriation. The study concludes with a discussion of the contributions and limitations. Keywords:. Celebration,. Clothing,. Consumption,. Cultural. Capital,. Design,. Exploration, Fashion, New, Old, Personalization, Physical Condition, Play, Power, Practices, Renewal, Rituals, Status, Social Visibility, Symbolic, Technology, Utilitarian.. iii.

(4) ÖZET. “YENİ” KIYAFET: ANLAMLAR VE UYGULAMALAR. Gökçen Coşkuner Master, İşletme Fakültesi Tez Yöneticisi: Özlem Sandıkçı Ağustos 2002 Bu tezde yeni kıyafetle ilgili duygular, tecrübeler ve uygulamalar araştırılmıştır. Bu çalışmada üç temel soru cevaplanmaya çalışılmıştır: Kıyafetin yeniliğini oluşturan etkenler nelerdir? Yeni kıyafet alımındaki motivler nelerdir? Yeni kıyafetlerin kişiselleştirilmesinde ne gibi uygulamalar yer almaktadır? Yeni ürünler üzerine geleneksel çalışmalar maddi özellikler ve teknolojik ürün kategorileri üzerinde yoğunlaşırken, bu tez soyut özellikler ve sembolik ürün kategorisi. üzerinde. çalışmaktadır. Çalışmada kalitatif metodlar kullanılmış ve farklı yaş, cinsiyet ve “kültürel sermaye” gruplarından 24 kişiyle görüşülmüştür. Kıyafetin yeniliğini oluşturan faktörler olarak fiziksel durum, teknoloji, dizayn, moda ve sosyal görünürlük. önerilmektedir. Çalışma yeni kıyafet alımı için iki motiv üzerinde. durmaktadır: faydacıl ve sembolik. Faydacıl motiv kişinin kıyafetleri yırtıldığı, eskidiği, lekelendiği ya da artık üstüne uymadığı zamanlarda kıyafet satın alması anlamına gelmektedir. Sembolik motivler ise kutlama, güç ve statü, keşif ve oyun, kendini yenilemeyi içermektedir. Katılımcılar tanıma ve uygunlaştırma gibi çeşitli uygulamalar yoluyla kişiselleştirmektedirler. Son bölümde araştırmanın akademik bilgiye katkıları ve sınırlı kaldığı yönler tartışılmaktadır. Anahtar Kelimeler: Eski, Faydacıl, Fiziksel Durum, Güç, Kendini Yenileme, Keşif, Kıyafet, Kişiselleştirme, Kutlama, Kültürel Sermaye, Moda, Oyun, Ritüel, Statü, Sembolik, Sosyal Görünürlük, Tüketim, Teknoloji, Tasarım,. iv. Uygulama, Yeni..

(5) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. I would like to thank to my supervisor Dr. Özlem Sandıkçı for her guidance and help during the process of writing this thesis as well as Güliz Ger and Sibel Kalaycıoğlu for their valuable insights and advices. I would like extend my thanks to Burçak Ertimur, Ece İlhan and Baskın Yenicioğlu both for their contribution in data collection and theoretical discussion processes of the thesis and also for their great love and support as friends. I also appreciate Özgün Güler’s and Altan İlkuçan’s technical support in my study. Lastly I would like to express my gratitude to my dear family to have encouraged and supported me all through the way and my brother Özgür Coşkuner for his contributions in this thesis.. v.

(6) TABLE OF CONTENTS. ABSTRACT ...........................................................................................................iii ÖZET......................................................................................................................iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................vi CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 1 CHAPTER II. STUDYING ‘NEW’ ........................................................................ 7 II.1. Product Level Studies ................................................................................... 8 II.2. Individual Level Studies ............................................................................. 18 CHAPTER III. EPHEMERA AND SYMBOLISM OF FASHION ..................... 26 III.1. III.2. III.3. III.4.. Ephemera.................................................................................................. 27 Symbolism................................................................................................ 29 Postmodernism and Fashion..................................................................... 37 Newness and Fashion ............................................................................... 39. CHAPTER IV. METHODS .................................................................................. 46 IV.1. IV.1.1. IV.1.2. IV.2. IV.3. IV.3.1. IV.3.2. IV.4.. Informants ................................................................................................ 47 Gender and Age........................................................................................ 49 Cultural Capital ........................................................................................ 51 Background Information Questionnaire................................................... 55 Projective Techniques .............................................................................. 56 Collages.................................................................................................... 56 Metaphoric Portraits................................................................................. 57 In-Depth Interviews ................................................................................. 58. CHAPTER V. ANALYSIS AND RESULTS ....................................................... 60 V.1. V.2. V.2.1. V.2.2. V.3.. Attitude Toward Fashion .......................................................................... 61 Understandings of Old and New .............................................................. 63 Old ............................................................................................................ 64 New........................................................................................................... 70 Constituents of “Newness” For Clothing ................................................. 76 vi.

(7) V.3.1. Physical Condition.................................................................................... 77 V.3.2. Social Visibility ........................................................................................ 78 V.3.3. Fashion ..................................................................................................... 80 V.3.4. Technology ............................................................................................... 81 V.3.5. Design....................................................................................................... 82 V.4. Motivations for New Clothing Purchase .................................................. 85 V.4.1. Utilitarian.................................................................................................. 86 V.4.2. Symbolic................................................................................................... 87 V.4.2.1.Celebration ............................................................................................... 88 V.4.2.2.Power and Status ...................................................................................... 92 V.4.2.3.Play and Exploration ................................................................................ 97 V.4.2.4.Renewal .................................................................................................. 103 V.5. Personalizing New Clothing................................................................... 105 CHAPTER VI. CONCLUSION.......................................................................... 116 VI.1.. Contributions and Limitations................................................................. 120. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 122 Table 1 ................................................................................................................. 134 Table 2 ................................................................................................................. 135 APPENDIX A ..................................................................................................... 136 APPENDIX B...................................................................................................... 144 APPENDIX C...................................................................................................... 148. vii.

(8) CHAPTER I. I. INTRODUCTION. Context The girl is browsing through the pages of a magazine where the ads and news are all announcing new products, new clothes, new cosmetics, new looks, new hair styles, new places to live, new places to visit, new places to eat out, new experiences…. In the background one of the popular Turkish song plays: “ I have to tell, this year wasn’t good The fate did not choose me but I should not mind it Maybe I should start all from the beginning I should throw out what I worshipped yesterday I need A new love A new job A new reason to smile A new message A new fate And luck for all these A new posture A new touch I need to explore one by one A new life And the rest is not important I need a new me A new reason for myself!” (Bu sene iyi geçmedi, söylemem lazım Kader beni seçmedi, ama görmemem lazım Belki birdenbire yeniden başlamam gerek Eskiden taptığımı bugün taşlamam gerek. 1.

(9) Yeni bir aşk Yeni bir iş Yine gülecek bir neden lazım Yeni bir haber Yeni bir kader Bunlar için bana sanş lazım Yeni bir duruş Yeni dokunuş Tek tek keşfetmem lazım Yeni bir hayat Gerisi bayat Kendime yeni bir ben lazım Kendime yeni bir neden lazım!). This is an imaginary scene drafted to ilustrate the fascination with the new. Newness is prayed as a means of easing troubles, providing a new beginning, a new life and a new reason. Objects are promoted through their novelty, and new products and new looks are continuously emphasized in the media.. It was this emphasis on novelty that drifted me towards studying the concept of newness. I think that exploring the concept of newness is important in the sense that it can provide insights as to the motivations, feelings and behaviors of consumers. Elaborating more on the subject, I realized that the research on new products did not offer an understanding about consumers’ experiences and feelings. It rather focuses on the product and consumer related factors that affect the adoption and diffusion of new products. Moreover the research in this area was limited with tangible features of mostly technological innovations. Although Hirschman (1982) has proposed symbolic innovations as a distinct category no empirical study was done in the area about the constituents of newness for symbolic products.. 2.

(10) For the purposes of studying the concept of newness I chose clothing. Clothing provides an appropriate ground to study newness through its ephemeral and symbolic nature. Fashion under capitalism exhibits planned obsolescence. Western fashion is pivoted around the concept of ‘newness’ or ‘nowness’(Fox-Genovese 1987). Consequently fashion is deemed to have no inherent meaning beyond serving as a means to an end; it is by nature ephemeral. Second, clothing provides an appropriate ground to focus on the symbolic aspect of products. Clothing is suggested to have many symbolic connotations such as class, subcultural identity, religion, gender roles, nationality etc.. Research Objectives This thesis is about the meanings associated with new clothes, created in consumer practices and experiences. It interrogates the emic understanding/s of newness and how newness is defined for a highly symbolic product category; clothing. It explores the practices and experiences related to new clothes proposing strategies for personalization of the newly purchased garments. The study also elaborates on the motivations of buying new clothes and their uses.. Trajectory of the thesis The thesis is organized into five chapters. Chapter 2 reviews the new product literature. New product literature focuses on product and consumer related factors that affect the diffusion and adoption of a product mainly through technological. 3.

(11) innovations. Symbolic innovations and people’s feelings and experiences remain understudied.. Chapter 3 offers a review of the literature on fashion, including studies conducted within and outside the marketing field. I begin with outlining the reasons why fashion is an appropriate ground for studying the concept of newness. I elaborate on the ephemeral and symbolic nature of fashion, linking the discussion to postmodernism. I conclude the chapter by reviewing key investigations on fashion that are relevant to this study. Chapter 3 together with Chapter 2 outlines the motivation of this study.. In Chapter 4, I discuss the purpose and the methodology of the empirical study. In order to obtain emic understandings of new clothing, practices and experiences, qualitative research methods were used. The study draws on four sets of data: background information questionnaire, metaphoric portraits, collages and in-depth interviews. Twenty-four informants were recruited through purposive sampling. Three criteria was used for selecting the informants: age, gender and cultural capital. The informants were divided into two in terms of age; those between 23 and 35 and those between 35 and 62. In terms of cultural capital low cultural and high cultural capital informants were recruited where their levels of cultural capital were assessed using Holt’s (1998) method.. 4.

(12) In Chapter 5, I describe my research findings. The analysis aimed to explore the concept of newness and experiences and practices of different group of informants. The findings are organized into three categories. At the first stage I discuss five constituents of newness: physical condition, purchase timing, technology, design and fashion. Next, I elaborate on two different motivations for purchasing new clothes: utilitarian and symbolic. I categorize the symbolic motivations as celebration, power and status, exploration and play and renewal. Third, I discuss strategies for personalization of newly purchased clothing items. Overall, high cultural and low cultural capital groups share the same motivations and derive similar symbolic meanings. Both groups use new clothes for celebratory occasions. Among high cultural capital group new year, Valentine’s day, birthdays, weddings and going to a bar or restaurant are typical incidents of celebration. Low cultural capital informants , on the other hand, prefer to wear new garments on religious holidays. The data suggests that high cultural capital groups are more affected by global culture and lifestyles than lower cultural groups are, and this influence is reflected on their clothing practices.. Finally, in Chapter 6, I summarize the contributions of my research and outline the issues that can be explored in further studies. This study extends two main research areas: new product and fashion. It contributes to the new product research by offering an explanation of the constituents of newness for a symbolic product category. On the other hand, it contributes to the fashion literature by exploring the meanings of new clothing, and experiences and practices related to it. It also adds to. 5.

(13) research that study the relation between self and possessions because it offers specific examples as to how new clothes are personalized, why some items are not personalized and why some personalized items are discarded from the self domain.. 6.

(14) CHAPTER II. II. STUDYING “NEW”. There is all around us today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, and this represents something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species. Strictly speaking, the human beings of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects (Baudrillard, 1998; 25). As Baudrillard (1998) notes in the era of mass production and consumption we experience multiplication of objects. Furniture, books, cars, clothes etc. are all produced in vast numbers and in new variants. In such a context I believe studying the concept of newness can provide insights about the experiences and feelings rendered by new products and understanding about consumer motivations and behaviors.. The previous research in the area has mainly focused on the adoption and diffusion of new products. Within the field of marketing the concept of newness has received substantial research interest especially since the early 1960s. The reason for this interest. is. the. high. failure. rate. 7. of. new. consumer. products..

(15) Over the years, the concepts of newness and innovation have been explored, the constituents of newness as perceived by consumers and producers have been questioned and models have been proposed for predicting consumers’ behaviors in relation to new products.. In this chapter, I will explore the research in the area, which I group under two categories: product level studies and consumer level studies. At the product level, research is primarily concerned with examining product-related factors affecting the acceptance of an innovation-an idea perceived as new by the individual (Rogers and Shoemaker, 1971)- without taking into considerations behavioral and perceptual characteristics of the individual consumer. At the individual level, studies focus on the identification of who would or would not adopt an innovation and the personal characteristics such as creativity and novelty seeking that leads to product adoption.. II.1. Product Level Studies. At the product level studies propose continuums of innovations and discuss product related factors that effect the adoption of new products. While doing these, studies focus on technological products such as hybrid corn, cars and tangible features of products such as price, advertising etc. They neglect products such as clothes, books, songs etc. whose novelty do not necessarily result from an additional tangible feature or technological improvement but rather from other intangible sources.. 8.

(16) Rogers (1983) defines an innovation as an idea perceived as new by the individual. Rogers and Shoemaker (1971) highlight that it matters little, so far as human behavior is concerned whether or not an idea is objectively new as measured by the lapse of time since its first use or discovery. They point out, that it is the perceived or subjective newness of the idea for the individual that determines his/her reaction to it.. Innovations are typically defined subjectively in relation to the perceptual processes of the innovator and objectively in relation to the characteristics of the innovation. For example, Rogers (1962, 13) refer to any idea or product perceived by a potential innovator to be new. Other definitions refer to the objective characteristics of new products, such as new models or new packages.. Several theoretical frameworks exist within the new product literature for classifying innovations. For instance, Robertson (1971) suggests a continuum may that classifies new products in terms of how continuos or discontinuous their effects are on established consumption patterns. He delineates three types of innovations: continuous innovations, dynamically continuous innovations and discontinuous innovations. A continuous innovation has the least disrupting influence on established consumption patterns (eg. annual new model automobile changeovers). A dynamically continuos innovation has more disrupting effects than a continuos innovation (eg: electric toothbrushes). A discontinuous innovation involves the establishment of new consumption patterns and the creation of previously unknown. 9.

(17) products (eg: the first PC). Furthermore Robertson distinguishes between two types of discontinuous innovations: innovations that perform a previously unfulfilled function or innovations that perform an existing function in a new way. Robertson points out that while this theoretical framework recognizes that not all innovations are of the same order of newness, it does not distinguish new products from products that are not new. The central thesis of Robertson’s approach is that innovations may be conceived as more or less innovative depending on the proportion of features they share with earlier models.. In another study, Gobeli and Brown (1987) identify four types of innovations that differ in their degree of newness based on both consumers’ and producers’ perceptions of newness. The continuum they propose is quite similar to that is proposed by Robertson, only in the first the consumers’ and producers’ perceptions are distinguished. In the Gobeli and Brown model, the first type of innovation, labelled incremental product innovation, incorporates little new technology and provides few new benefits to the consumer. Product line extensions generally fall in this category. The second type of innovation, labelled technical innovation, is new to the industry in terms of technology embodied into the new product, but is not perceived as providing many new benefits to the consumers. In the automobile industry, for example, the Cord of the 1930s incorporated a new front wheel drive technology that was not perceived as a new benefit from consumers. In such innovations, although product improvement is present, the consumer does not perceive any real benefits. The third type of innovation, labelled application. 10.

(18) innovation, does not utilize significantly new technologies, however, it is likely to require changes in consumer usage behavior and it is new to the relevant buyer. The Sony Walkman is an example of an application innovation. The fourth type of innovation, labelled radical innovation, incorporates radical technologies and requires significant changes in existing consumption patterns. Radical innovations include television, the personal computer when they were first introduced.. Another similar continuum of innovations was offered by Kleinshmidt and Cooper (1991). They differentiate among three types of innovations based on their degree of newness. The first type of innovation refers to new-to-the-world products, or in other words, products that are new to the firm and new to the consumer. The second type of innovation is new to the firm but not new to the target consumer. The third type of innovation refers to products that incorporate minor improvements or reportioning of existing products.. On a similar note, Firth and Narayanan (1996) delineate three dimensions to differentiate among new products that differ in their degree of newness. The first dimension is the newness of the technology embodied in the new product. This dimension addresses the degree to which the core technologies embodied in a new product are consistent with those used by the firm. The second dimension, the newness of the market application addresses the degree to which the market application is new to the firm. The third dimension refers to the degree to which the product is considered new in the marketplace itself.. 11.

(19) Veryzer (1998) suggests two dimensions to delineate the various levels or degrees of innovations. The first dimension is technological capability and refers to the degree to which the innovation involves new technologies. The second dimension is product capability and refers to the benefits of the product as perceived by the consumer. Based on these two dimensions, he identifies four types of innovations. The first type of innovation, labelled continuous innovation, encompasses products that utilize existing technology and provide the same benefits as existing products. The second type of innovation, labelled commercially discontinuous, is perceived by consumers as being really new regardless of whether or not it incorporates a new technology. The third type of innovation, labelled technologically discontinuous, incorporates highly advanced new technologies; it is however perceived as being essentially the same as previously existing products. The fourth type of innovation, labelled technologically and commercially discontinuous, involves significant new technologies and is recognised as offering significantly enhanced benefits to the consumers.. Ziamou (1999) identifies five dimensions used by the researchers to differentiate among the innovations that differ in their degree of newness perceived by organizational members and consumers. The degree of newness as perceived by the organizational members reflects: changes in the technology involved in the new product, changes in the technology involved in the manufacturing process and changes in market applications for which the new product is targeted. The degree of newness perceived by the consumers reflects changes in the product benefits that the. 12.

(20) new product offers to the consumer and changes in existing consumption patterns. Ziamou suggests that from the consumer’s perspective, innovations can be viewed as lying along the functionality of the innovation (what the product does) and the consumer’s input (what she/he needs to do to obtain the expected functionality.) She asserts that these two dimensions determine how novel the product is to the consumer.. While these studies develop continuums of innovations based on the technological aspects of the products, Hirschman (1982) suggests symbolism as a source of product innovation. Hirschman distinguishes between symbolic and technological innovations. Technological innovations are those that spring from the addition or alteration of tangible features of a product that serve to distinguish it from prior models. A symbolic innovation, on the other hand, communicates a different social meaning than it did previously. The physical form of the innovation remains predominantly unchanged, but the meaning assigned transforms.Unlike symbolic innovations whose innovativeness derive from the assignment of novel intangible attributes to an existing product, a technological innovation possesses some tangible feature that never existed in that product class. Hirschman argues that the traditional innovation diffusion model works well as a descriptive and explanatory device for technological innovations but fails to adequately explain and classify symbolic innovations and their adopters. According to Hirschman’s model symbolic innovations result from the reassignment of social meanings or intangible attributes to an existing product. Unlike tangible attributes, intangible attributes do not arise. 13.

(21) from the physical nature of the object itself but are given to the object by the consumer. For example, sexiness, conservatism, and prestige are intangible attributes that may be associated with products. Products may vary in the amount of socially symbolic (intangible) meaning they convey and in the degree to which socially symbolic meaning contributes to their perceived innovativeness. A central idea in viewing symbolic innovations is that they may have been physically present in society for an extensive period of time, yet be considered innovations at the present time. This is because their innovativeness arises not from the novelty of their tangible features (which are already “known”), but rather from a change in the social meaning (intangible attributes) assigned to the product, which makes it appear novel as a symbol. Hirschman argues that the diffusion pattern for such innovations are guided by their use as social referents, rather than technological performance. Consumers who want to identify with the lifestyle they are perceived to represent do choose to adopt them; those who do not wish to emulate such a life style do not adopt them. Thus, symbolic innovations are adopted primarily for their utility as social communicative devices and not for their technological superiority. Hirschman’s examples for symbolic innovations include skirts, pants, ties, socks, and shoes, in which length, widtHCC, and designs have gone “in” and “out” of style in successive cycles or which have been adopted and discarded as symbols of different reference groups on a longitudinal basis.. At the product level analysis, while conceptual studies focus on classifications of innovations, modeling based studies focus on predicting sales and price path of. 14.

(22) new products. For example, Bass’s (1969) single equation diffusion model forecast category sales for a new durable product has been extended to include marketing variables of advertising ( Horsky and Simon 1983; Kalish, 1985), and price (Robinson and Lakhani, 1975; Bass, 1980; Dolan and Jeuland, 1981; Kalish, 1985), and other parameters such as competitive effects (Robertson and Gatington, 1986; Gatington and Robertson, 1989), income distribution and product uncertainty (Horsky,1990), multi-state populations (Dodson and Muller, 1978), price expectations of consumers (Narasimhan, 1989), risk (Jeuland, 1981; Kalish,1985), states of word of mouth (Mahajan, et al., 1984) and target market expansion (Mahajan and Petersen, 1978).. Several studies investigate the characteristics of innovations that affect diffusion (Robertson 1971, Rogers and Shoemaker 1971, Zaltman and Wallendorf 1979). These studies suggest several characteristics that influence diffusion: relative advantage, the degree to which an innovation is perceived superior to the one it will replace or compete against, compatibility; the extent to which the new product is consistent with existing values and the past experience of the adopter, complexity the degree to which the innovation is difficult to understand or to use, triability the degree to which an innovation may be tried by consumers on a limited basis, observability; the extent to which an innovation is visible to others (Rogers and Shoemaker, 1971). 15.

(23) In addition, the novelty of a product is a factor that affects the choice of the consumer. Economists who are critical of neoclassical view, which reduces the role of the consumer to utility maximization, suggest newness as an alternative explanation for consumer choice behavior. As, for example, Bianchi (2001) suggests, desire for variety and contrast plays a role in consumer choice. She criticizes the theory of household production (Gorman, 1953; Griliches, 1961; Becker, 1965; Lancaster, 1971; Rosen, 1974) for its inability to account for the adoption of nontechnological products such as new books or songs. She asserts that it is straight forward to understand how the production of strictly functional properties can be improved by the use of new and more efficient inputs, as when an increase in horsepower increases the speed achieved by cars. She questions the appeal and advantages of new goods with intangible attributes such as new songs and books over the old ones. According to Bianchi the more easily recognizable the fashion good is, the more it appropriates a familiar pattern and the more imitated it is, the quicker and the faster it is abandoned. And conversely, the more flexible and complex a good is the longer it preserves its novelty. She argues that Mozart is always fashionable because it is complex, and offers different experiences to the listener every time he/she listens to it. Bianchi suggests that since goods are complexes, acquaintance with one dimension of the good may itself open up new, hitherto undetected ones and that we can repeatedly listen to the same piece of music or read the same poem and still discover previously unnoticed details that continue to make the experience pleasurable. She asserts that within this framework, odd forms of consumer behavior, such as craving, collecting, or iterated consumption, do. 16.

(24) seem to yield increasing marginal utilities, but they do so only because they deliver more of the different, not more of the same, experience.. D.E. Berlyne (1971) suggests an alternative explanation for the appeal new products. He asserts that novelty, complexity, variety, and surprise have positive effects on pleasure. He argues that when we face a task that is too difficult or a problem that is too complex, the experience is frustrating and will be abandoned, but when a behavioral or cognitive key allows us to deal with the difficulty, the experience can be transformed into something pleasurable and worthwhile. According to this theory, then, it is not the absolute level of novelty and variety that is felt as pleasurable, but the change relative to an initial and unsettling position that causes pleasure to increase. Thus the cognitive processes that we have seen at work in the case of goods, and which help to increase and reduce their degree of novelty relative to what is perceived by us as either too familiar or too complex, may also have an important pleasure dimension attached to them.. There are goods whose consumption increases with exposure, such as listening to music. But on the basis of the previous discussion, we should predict the opposite, that the more we consume of a good the more its novelty erodes and the less likeable it becomes. Its consumption may eventually drop to zero as its experienced novelty is eliminated. Unless, by the same process, we are able to somehow to renew that novelty. Goods, we have seen, are complexes of multiple elements, in which the system of internal and external connections supplies a general frame of reference. 17.

(25) and recognizability. Any new piece of music of a familiar genre or style confirms what we have learned to expect from it in general, but disconforms it in detail, and it is this mismatch that is felt as pleasurable (Rozin, 1999, p.127) Any new mystery, any new seasonal collection of familiar items of clothing, any new watch, by adding new variants to a recognizable pattern or style, displaces our set of expectations and causes pleasure once again to increase. It is clear, however, that the process of variation that defamiliarizes the known does not necessarily require the appearance of new goods.. II.2. Individual Level Studies. At the individual level, studies focus on psychographics and demographic traits that make an individual more adept to adopt new products. Among psychographics traits innovativeness is the most discussed one in relation to new product adoption. Scholars have interrogated factors leading to innovativeness and discussed various types of innovative behavior.. The primary studies at the individual level started with French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1903), who pioneered in proposing the S-shaped diffusion curve and the role of opinion leaders in the process of imitation. Then in the early 1940s two sociologists, Bryce Ryan and Neal Gross (1943), studied the diffusion of hybrid seed corn among Iowa farmers. They proposed an S-shape, normal curve when plotted on. 18.

(26) a cumulative basis over time for adoption of the agricultural innovation. The first farmers to adopt (innovators) were more cosmopolite and of higher socioeconomic status than late adopters. Later studies related innovative behavior to higher income or higher spending on products (Mason and Bellenger 1973-4; Baumgarten 1975; Forsythe et al. 1991; Goldsmith and Flynn 1992); higher product interest (Schrank and Gilmore 1973; Mason and Bellenger 1973-4; Reynolds and Darden 1973, 1974; Goldsmith et al. 1987); higher communicated experience (Mason and Bellenger 1973-4; Reynolds and Darden 1973, 1974; Painter and Granzin 1976; Goldsmith and Flynn 1992); and higher perceptions of innovation attributes (Labay and Kinnear 1981; Holak 1988; Holak and Lehmann 1990). Studies suggest that early adopters have more education, more income, and higher occupation status than do nonadopters (Adcock, Hirschman and Goldstucker, 1977; Bell, 1963; Feldman and Armstrong, 1975; Kegerries and Engel, 1969; Labay and Kinnear, 1981; Plummer, 1971; Robertson,1971; Rogers and Shoemaker, 1971; Rogers and Stanfield, 1968). Innovators are also found to be more inner directed than non-innovators (Macdonald and Jacobs, 1992) and they are driven by sensation-seeking and uniqueness-seeking motives when adopting new products (Burns and Krampf, 1992). Consumers are also classified based on the rapidity of their adoption: an innovator, early adopter, early majority, late majority, laggard categorization (Rogers and Shoemaker, 1971).. Other studies have also linked age of adopters with product characteristics of the innovation (Adcock et al., 1977; Porter, Swerdlow and Staples, 1979; McClurg and Andrews, 1974; Lunsford and Burnett, 1992). Linkage has also been found between. 19.

(27) innovation adoption and psychological constructs such as product experience (Zaltman and Stiff, 1973), origince and intellectence traits (Dickerson and Gentry,1983) and family power (Burns, 1992).. Rogers and Shoemaker (1971) define innovativeness as the degree to which an individual is relatively earlier in adopting an innovation than other members of his social system. Rogers and Shoemaker has found innovativeness to be highly correlated with educational attainment, occupational status, and urbanization.. Midgley and Dowling (1978) on the other hand, state that innovativeness is “the degree to which an individual is receptive to new ideas and makes innovation decisions independently of the communicated experience of others”(p.236). These writers view innovativeness as a personality construct possessed to a greater or lesser degree by all individuals. It is believed to be a continuous variable normally distributed within a population of consumers and generalizable across products. However, Midgley and Dowling neither provide explanations of the causes generating innovativeness nor discuss why some individuals exhibit more innovativeness than others do.. Price and Ridgway (1983) distinguish between two types of innovativeness: use and purchase. Use innovativeness is innovative product usage behavior of a previously adopted product in a novel way in a variety of ways. That is, use innovativeness is innovative behavior relative to the product usage process while purchase. 20.

(28) innovativeness relates to the product purchase process. These two innovative behaviors need to be separated as “a consumer may purchase a product or instead not to purchase-stretching a currently owned product to additional uses… the decision to buy or not to buy represents nearly dichotomous manifestations of high stimulation needs” (Price and Ridgway 1982, 57). Price and Ridgway (1983) have specified use innovativeness as two levels of product consumption behavior: novel uses and variety of uses. Empirical research has examined use innovativeness as a product consumption behavior in post-adoption process and attempted to relate it with product usage variables such as use patterns, use frequency and use variety toward multi-functional consumer durables (Price and Ridgway 1983, 1984; Anderson and Ortinau 1988; Ram and Jung 1989; Foxall and Bhate 1991).. Along parallel lines, Hirschman (1980) points to a subtle distinction between components of innovative behavior: the actual adoption of a new product (purchase innovativeness);. the. acquisition. of. new. product. information. (vicarious. innovativeness); and the adaptive use of old products (use innovativeness). Hirschman argues that when faced with a novel consumption problem to solve this problem the consumer can either adopt a new product that is perceived to be better solving the new problem or he/she can use a presently adopted product to solve the new consumption problem. The first is referred to as purchase innovativeness and the latter as the use innovativeness. Through vicarious innovativeness, consumers can adopt the product concept without adopting the product itself so that they avoid the risk and expense. Based on their decisions regarding whether actual purchase is. 21.

(29) desirable, consumers may take one of two actions: to purchase a new product that is perceived to be better solving the new consumption problem or to utilize a previously adopted product in an innovative way.. Hirschman (1980) sees creativity as a source of innovativeness. She defines creativity, as the problem solving capability possessed by the individual that may be applied toward solving consumption related problems. She suggests that the highly creative consumer is better able to decide whether to adopt a novel product to solve an existing consumption problem. She says that if the person compares the novel product now used and perceives that the innovation is superior, the new product will be adopted. The highly creative consumers will be more adept at both types of innovative behaviors (Hirschman, 1980). Creative consumers, who have problemsolving capabilities in consumption situations, are competent to new product evaluation. They may adopt the idea of the innovation but do not necessarily purchase a new product. Instead they may decide to utilize existing products in a new way. Such creative and innovative use by consumers can be source of an innovation that generates a secondary diffusion. Use innovativeness was found to be correlated with product involvement (Park, 1995).. Novelty seeking behavior is also proposed as a source of innovativeness. Hirshman (1980) discusses two explanations for novelty seeking. First is that novelty seeking serves as a means of self-preservation. She asserts: “The individual may find it useful to create a bank of potentially useful knowledge. Because the future is. 22.

(30) unknowable and unexpected, consumption problems are almost inevitable; the consumer may wisely decide to seek information that is not useful now, but may assume great importance in the future” (Hirschman, 1980: 284). Alternatively, novelty seeking behavior helps the individual to improve his/her problem-solving skills. That is, the consumer may seek information pertaining to presently adopted products and consumption situations in an effort to improve his/her future performance. Hirschman argues that this rationale for novelty seeking can lead the consumer to seek information and eventually adopt the new product.. In another paper, Hirschman (1982) suggests that religion can influence novelty seeking and information transfer- two areas that she believes are central to several consumption. processes:. innovation. diffusion. and. adoption,. promotional. effectiveness, interpersonal influence, and decision making. Her study of three religions- Catholicism, Protestanism-Juadism suggests that Jewish consumers exceed Catholics and Protestants on more specific aspects of both constructs. Moreover Hirschman and Stern (2001) propose consumer genes as exploratory of novelty seeking, innovativeness and sensation seeking and impulsive and compulsive consumption.. 23.

(31) Summary. Overall, the studies in the area have explored product and individual level factors that cause new product adoption. At the product level studies propose continuums for innovations, and focus on product related factors that affect the adoption of new products. As we have seen they concentrate on technological innovations and tangible attributes of products. At the individual level research explore pychographics and demographic characteristics for innovativeness. There are two main gaps in the area. First symbolic innovations are not studied. Second, the actual experiences and the practices of the consumers are not explored.. If one examines the diffusion innovation literature in even a casual fashion, one will be struck with two verities. First, the great majority of innovations whose diffusion patterns have been studied are primarily technological products, such as medicines, agricultural supplies, industrial machinery, electric appliances, and so forth (c/f. Bass 1969, Czepiel 1974, Rogers 1983) in contrast, much less research has been done on innovations which process both symbolic and technological content (cf, Hirchman 1983; 1986). Thus the literature in general has been focused upon products whose functional properties are generally tangible and often objectively verifiable in advance. The primary task confronting potential adopters of such innovations is to gather the requisite data for determining if the innovation will meet their needs/wants at a lower cost or with greater effectiveness than the product they are currently using (Hirschman 1980; Robertson and Gatington 1985; 1986). And in. 24.

(32) new product literature the research has mainly focused on technological innovations rather than symbolic. Thus it will be interesting to search what other things are important for the consumer if not the new benefits of the new product.. 25.

(33) CHAPTER III. III. EPHEMERA AND SYMBOLISM OF FASHION. In this land of fashion-ese, after all, last year was always the year when things were in flux, clothes lacked a certain element of fantasy, clothes had perhaps a touch too much fantasy, styles were a little overpowering, styles were a little dull; and this year is always the year when the dust has settled, fantasy has finally returned but in appropriate measure, the kinks have been worked out, there is a whole new sprit of finesse and refinement, and the new clothes are once more exciting-as exciting as they’ve ever been- but above all, eminently wearable ( Jamie Wolf, 1980:44).. The aim of this thesis is to explore the constituents of newness of symbolic products and to gain insights about the newness concept. For the purposes of the study I focus on clothes, which are among the most commonly desired, the most frequently purchased and used consumer goods (Ger and Belk 1996b; Lunt and Livingstone 1992). Fashion and clothing provide a well-suited ground to study ‘new’ for a couple of reasons. First, fashion under capitalism exhibits planned obsolescence (Faurshou, 1997). Western fashion is pivoted around the concept of ‘newness’ or ‘nowness (Fox-Genovese 1987). Consequently fashion is deemed to have no inherent meaning beyond serving as a means to an end; it is by nature ephemeral. Second, clothing provides an appropriate ground to focus on the symbolic aspect of. 26.

(34) products. Clothing is suggested to have many symbolic connotations such as class (Marx, 1954; Veblen 1899); subcultural identity (Hebdige, 1979), religion (Crawley, 1965b; Poll 1965), gender roles (Crawley, 1965; Rouse, 1989; Steele, 1989a; Oakley, 1981), nationality (Ger and Ostergaard 1998) etc.. In this chapter, I will first, discuss the ephemeral and symbolic nature of fashion, which makes it such a fertile ground to study the concept of newness. Then I will review postmodern approaches to fashion. And finally, I will discuss diffusion and adoption of clothes.. III.1 Ephemera. Many scholars working in the fashion area point out to the ephemeral nature of fashion. The so-called western fashion in this era has been characterized by novelty, rapid changes, a proliferation of styles, and, more important, the mass consumption of fashion goods. The development of the Western fashion pattern (and the corresponding meanings and images diffused by advertising, mass media, and the broadly defined fashion industry) has often been interpreted as an important basis of the ideology of consumption that energizes the variously termed “post-fordist”, “advanced”, or “late” capitalist economies (Bocock 1993; Giddens 1991; Jameson 1991; Lury 1996; Nichter and Nichter 1991; Rubenstein 1995; Sparke 1995; Williams 1982).. 27.

(35) Ephemera and emphasis on novelty are sited as important characteristics of fashion. As Jamie Wolf puts it is always the new garments that have more allure and that are more exciting. In similar lines, Davis (1992) addresses the ephemeral nature of fashion and points out: “What was in is now out, what was attractive yesterday is dowdy today; last year’s model never looks right, and try as you may, there’s nothing you can do to make it look right” ( p.103).. Fashion changes continuously. Whatever look or style is currently being featured is not the final word; the fashion industry always introduces new collections. The length of time it takes for a fashion movement to be revived or to repeat itself is decreasing in today’s society. Research shows that in the decades prior to 1950s, a silhouette’s life span was approximately 35 years, whereas, in post-World War II years, the silhouette has been changing on the average of seven to ten years (Mueller and Smiley, 1995: 45). As Davis argues, today a new style can usually survive no more than a season or two and intensive capitalisation and rationalization of the apparel industry, consumer affluence along with democratization and a loosening of class boundaries, and the greatly quickened flow of information via the electronic media are cited typically as factors accounting for the progressively shortened span of the fashion cycle.. 28.

(36) III.2. Symbolism. The highly symbolic nature of fashion provides an interesting case to study the concept of newness as well. Most of the time the novelties in fashion do not offer any new uses as does the innovations in high-tech area does, or using Hirschman’s classification the novelties in fashion are symbolic rather than technologic.. Semiotically speaking clothing and dress constitute signifying systems through which meanings of some sorts especially sexuality, social position, identities are communicated. A popularly hold view is that fashion and clothing communicate and reproduce social position. Clothing and fashion are understood as weapons and defenses used by different groups that make up a social order, a social hierarchy, in achieving, challenging or sustaining positions of dominance and supremacy. According to Marx (1954), fashion and clothing is a reflection of the class relations within the society. They are the most fetishised commodities produced and consumed within capitalist society and they are used for signifying status and power. He sees fashion and clothing as the most significant ways in which social relations between people are constructed, experienced and understood. The things people wear give shape and colour to social distinctions and inequalities, thereby legitimating and naturalizing those social distinctions and inequalities. Fashion historians also note the status competition among the nobility and the emerging bourgeoisie through fashion and clothing starting by the fourteenth century (Batterberry 1977; Hollander 1980; Konig 1973). By the fourteenth century clothing. 29.

(37) had come to be so intimately associated with status assertions and pretensions of sumptuary laws were enacted throughout Europe, which forbade commoners from displaying fabrics and styles that aristocracy sought to reserve for itself. Clothes worn in public were of prime importance in establishing the social standing of individuals and their families. Clothes were tools of oppression, a weapon wielded against the poor. The upper classes especially use clothes to differentiate themselves from the lower classes. Clothes signify their superior position in relation to lower classes (McDowell, 1984). Along similar lines Veblen (1899), analyzing the American society, pointed out the emulation between upper and lower classes through clothing. He argues that clothing served to upper classes’ distinguishing themselves from the lower classes. Through excessive and obsolescence consumption on clothing upper class could symbolically establish its superiority over persons of less means. In a similar analysis of the French society, Bourdieu (1984) argues that matters of taste comprise in large part the inherited cultural capital of dominant classes in modern society. The privileged possession of such capital, along with its judicious expenditure explains how dominant classes manage to reproduce themselves from generation to generation.. Clothing and fashion may also be used to indicate or define sexual, religious, ideological, national identities of people. Having said that, I must note two things; first, these significations must not be thought totally separate from one another since clothes may signify plural identities simultaneously and moreover, power and status relations may be inherent in all kinds of identities. Second, there may be other. 30.

(38) significations of clothing, which are not addressed here. However for the sake of simplicity, I will elaborate on some basic significations of clothing in separate order. Clothing along with cosmetics and coiffure compromises what is most closely attached to the corporeal self- it frames much of what we see when we see anotherit quite naturally acquires a special capacity to say things about the self (Stone, 1962). Dress, then, comes easily to serve as a kind of visual metaphor for identity and, as pertains in particular to the open societies of the West, for registering the culturally anchored ambivalences that resonate within and among identities. In their book The World of Goods (1979) Douglas and Isherwood assert: “Man needs goods for communication with others and for making sense of what is going on around him. The two needs are one, for communication can only be formed in a structured system of meanings.” By saying this they imply, first, that fashion and clothing may be used to make sense of the world and the things and people in it, that they are communicative phenomena. They imply, second, that the structured system of meanings, a culture, enables individuals to construct an identity by means of communication (Barnard, 1996).. Fashion and clothing are instrumental in the process of socialization into sexual and gender roles; they help shape people’s ideas of how men and women should look (Rouse, 1989). While what a culture considers as masculine or feminine dress may change, sex and gender distinctions may be made by means of the wearing or not wearing of a particular garment, color, texture, size or style of garment. For example, sex may be signaled by wearing trousers or not, as has been the. 31.

(39) conventional in the west, or by wearing an apron or not, as was conventional with various peoples in Africa (Crawley, 1965). Color, likewise, has been used to signal sex difference. Western cultures associate pink with girls and blue with boys. It is completely arbitrary which garment or color is deemed by a culture to be masculine or feminine, but once the decision has been made, the colors or garments form a paradigmatic set and meanings are determined or generated by means of the choices made from that paradigmatic set. Steele (1989a), for example, notes how, up to this time, men often wore silk stockings, cosmetics, long curled and perfumed hair…petticoat breeches, just like women. In similar line, Oakley (1981) points out how, in the 1830s and 40s, femininity consisted in frivolity, delicacy, inactivity and submissiveness. It might be argued, for example, in the 1980s and 90s in Europe and America it became increasingly acceptable for women to be concerned with creating and sustaining a career.. Dress and clothing may indicate membership of, or affiliation to, a particular religious group or denomination. Crawley (1965b) cites numerous cases of dress being worn temporarily for religious or magical purposes. He refers, for example, to the Muslim practice of wearing only the ihram when undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca. Poll’s work on the Hasidic Jews’ clothing is a good account of the phenomenon. Poll (1965) provides a detailed account, describing the dress codes of each of the six classes making up the Hasidic community in New York. Each if the groups in this Hasidic community has a corresponding dress code. The different forms of dress, indicate first, that one is a particular type of Jew and second, which. 32.

(40) level or grade of observance one practices. Sandikci and Ger (2001) elaborate on the fashion practices covered urban women in Turkey as a means of political and social identify formation and negotiation. They discuss that fashion practices are used by these women to differentiate themselves from the Westernized, secular Turkish women and at the same time from traditional Islamic women who wear a headscarf out of habit in rural areas and small towns and from the newly-rich Islamists.. Fashion and clothing may also be tools for expressing the ideological positions hold by various groups and for developing a sense of personal identity. Punk is a good example of this fact. It is possible to see, in the use of lavatory chains, binliners, safety pins, cheap trashy fabrics …vulgar designs…and nasty colors documented by Hebdige (1979: 107), an ideological assault on the aesthetic values of dominant classes, if not capitalism itself. Punk abandons what had been traditional, conventional and dominant ideas and beliefs about prettiness, and feminine prettiness in particular, in favor of a completely different set of ideas and beliefs. In these ways, fashion and clothing are used as ideological weapons in a struggle between social groups. One set of ideas, an ideology, is set against another set of ideas, another ideology. Thompson and Haytko (1997) maintain that consumers’ fashion orientations and behaviors serve for self-identity construction. They assert that consumers’ self-defining fashion based distinctions express an implicit identification with (or distancing from) a relevant social group, such as the hard-core cyclist versus the settled, sedentary family man and those who wanted to stand out versus business school clones.. 33.

(41) National identities may also be signaled, reproduced and negotiated through clothes. Expressing national identity does not have to be in the form of wearing national costumes. For instance, Ger and Ostergaard (1998), in their study of Turkish immigrants in Denmark, suggest that although these Turkish people think that they are modern TurkoDanes, Danes can tell they are not Danish by the way they get dressed.. While some scholarly work focuses on what clothes communicate, others focus on how they communicate. Many semioticians contend that fashion symbols can be viewed and studied as a language of artificial symbols that approximate the semiotic concept of a code (Barthes 1983; Davis 1985a; Eco 1979; Simon-Miller, 1985). In the study of semiotics, theorists and researchers have attempted to demonstrate that appearance is a visual language with its own distinctive grammar, syntax, and vocabulary (Lurie, 1981). In The Language of Clothes, Lurie argues that there are many different languages of dress, each having its own vocabulary and grammar (Lurie 1992:4). Fowles (1974) notes that in a system of fashion language, fabrics and colors are the phonemes, dress items the words, wardrobes the vocabulary, outfits the sentences and the pattern of putting an outfit together the grammar.. In The Fashion System Roland Barthes (1983) uses a semiotic approach to analyze the language used to describe fashion. According to Barthes there are “for any particular object (a dress, a tailored suit, a belt) three different structures exist, one technical, another, iconic, the third, verbal” (p.5). The technical structure is the. 34.

(42) actual fashion object the garment itself. The iconic structure is any photograph, picture, or image of the object, and the verbal structure is the written or spoken description of the object. Thus the “language of fashion” is essentially the translation from the technical structure to the verbal structure, the words used to describe actual fashion objects. Fashion acquires its meaning through its language; that is, the descriptions of fashion objects in media sources such as fashion magazines, advertisements, or newspaper articles. And the meaning of technical structure of fashion can best be studied by analyzing these descriptions. Thus, according to Barthes, to understand the meaning of fashion one must understand how the fashion is described. He focuses on the significations of specific dress codes such as what it means if the collar of the cardigan is closed or open.. He. distinguishes what he calls the ‘vestimentary code’ from the rhetorical system. The vestimentary code operates in terms of denotation and the rhetorical system operates in terms of connotation. It is the function of the latter to make the arbitrary status or character of the former appears natural. The analysis of the vestimentary code is an attempt to discover a constant form in order to understand how vestimentary meaning is produced.. Mc Cracken (1990) considers fashion as a language through which identity and social intercourse is signaled. He shows that clothes are read not as individual units composed into a whole, either in terms of the social type evoked by an outfit (for example; housewife, hippie, businessman), or in terms of the look as a whole. Where an outfit cannot be interpreted, people either take one item of clothing as. 35.

(43) being the most salient and classify that, or else produce an account, which can reconcile the codes attached to different items of the outfit.. Davis (1992), in similar lines with McCracken, notes the ambiguity of fashion codes. He cites three features of the clothing-fashion code. First, clothing code is heavily context depended; that is, what some combinations of clothes will vary tremendously depending upon the identity of the wearer, the occasion, the place, the company, and even something as vague and transient as the wearer’s and the viewer’s moods. Second, there is considerable variability in how its constituent symbols are understood and appreciated by different cultural capital and taste groupings. Meanings are more ambiguous in that it is hard to get people in general to interpret the same clothing symbols in the same way; in semiotic terminology, the clothing sign’s signifier-signified relationship is quite unstable. Yet the meanings are more differentiated in as much as, to the extent that identifiable thoughts, images, and associations crystallize around clothing symbols, these will vary markedly, most certainly at first, between different cultural capital and taste subcultures (Gans, 1974). Third, undercoding occurs in the absence of reliable interpretative rules persons presume or infer on the basis of such hard-to-specify cues as gesture, inflection, pace, facial expression, context, and setting, certain molar meanings in a text, score, performance, or other communication.. 36.

(44) III.3. Postmodernism and Fashion. Fashion has been especially attractive to postmodernists (e.g. Kroker and Kroker 1987; Faurschou 1987; Wark 1991) because of its symbolic nature. Symbolism is discussed as a prominent characteristic of the postmodern age (Firat and Venkatesh, 1994; Baudrillard, 1981; Debord, 1983). To Baudrillard (1981), the society of the spectacle has become the society of signification, and “an object is not an object of consumption unless it is released from its physic determinations as a symbol, from its functional determinations as an instrument, from its commercial determinations as a product; and is thus liberated as a sign to be captured by the formal logic of fashion, i.e. by the logic of differentiation” (p.67). Moving beyond the Marxian analysis of exchange value, he sees all human relationships as grounded in the sign value. The world is neither representational nor material, but purely symbolic. It is more than symbolic- it is significatory. The consumer object becomes a code or a signifier, and a free-floating one at that, for meaning change through a logic of fashion and differentiation.. According to Barthes the function of consumer goods satisfying material needs cannot be separated from the symbolic meanings of commodities, or what Barthes calls “significations.’ Consumption for Barthes is embedded within systems of signification, of making and maintaining distinctions.. 37.

(45) Postmodernists see consumption as a libratory act combining both the real and the imaginary. In it one can consume objects, symbols, and images, increasingly recognized to be one and the same (Venkatesh and Firat, 1995). The understanding that no object has any inherent function or value independent of the symbolic gains greater acceptance, and the illusionary separations between the real and the simulation, the material and the imaginary, the product and the image dissolve. As the consumption sector turns more and more toward the consumption of images, the society at large becomes more and more a society of the spectacle (Debord, 1983).. Postmodern culture, in this sense, is fashion- the continuous rehabilitation of images, styles, and tropes (Barthes 1983; Faurschou 1987). It is in the realm of consumption, therefore, that such rehabilitation takes place and where signs- more important, the meanings of sings- are produced, reproduced, manipulated, reconstructed, appropriated, and discarded (Leary 1968).. Fashion is described as a parody of hypermodern culture (Kroker and Kroker 1987). In the age of postmodernity Faurchou defines fashion as the commodity par excellence. According to Faurchou late capitalism is the society of consumption, the society of mass market, and in this era it is no longer an economy seeking to fulfill the needs of a modernizing society but a society driven to create a perpetual desire for need, for novelty, for endless difference and instant satisfaction. She asserts that the fashion object appears as the most chaotic, fragmented and elusive of commodities. She argues that fashion is the most ephemeral and trivial of leisure. 38.

(46) pursuits, infinitely distanced from its ritual, mystical, religious, ceremonial, or simply capacity for communication. The fashion consumer has become the object of the endless cycle of desire, whose body is decoded and recoded with new collections, who is cynical, neophiliac and who tries to reconstruct his/her identity within this overloaded goods and signs system.. In an evaluation of fashion and postmodernism, Wilson (1992) characterizes a postmodernist explanation of fashion as a combination of fragmentation and identity in which dress either glues the false identity together on the surface or lends a theatrical and play acting aspect to the hallucinatory experience of the contemporary world. The pastiche of fashion design meshes with the pluralism of everyday dress codes. Fashion is the perfect toil for a world of fragmented and incommensurate identities and personae, offering a dynamic procession of free-floating signs and symbolic exchanges. “Postmodernism expresses at one level a horror at the destructive excess of western consumerist society, yet, in aesthecising this horror, we somehow convert it into a pleasurable object of consumption (Wilson, 1992: 4).. III.4. Newness and Fashion. Newness has been a subject of interrogation in fashion with its important role in diffusion. The first studies aim to demonstrate the factors effective in the diffusion and/or adoption of new fashions such as class, opinion leaders, the motivation of the. 39.

(47) consumer. In this part of the chapter I will explore some of the basic studies in the area. I believe that this will provide insight of the nature of the studies in the area and how newness is studied.. One of the most prominent theories in the area is the trickle down theory of Veblen, which asserts that leading social groups set new trends in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the masses, the new trends are then adopted by those next in the peeking order until eventually they trickle down to lower social groups. By this time, the trendsetters have moved onto new pastures. According to Veblen the leisure classes continually had to change what they were wearing, the fashion, in order to re-establish the differences between them and the classes below. The lower classes are left to simply copy the styles of the upper classes, to adopt the styles and shapes as soon and as they can. And when the lower classes have copied the styles of the upper classes, the upper classes must find new styles to wear, new fashions. They must do this in order to re-establish the visual markers of social difference: once the lower classes are visually indistinguishable from the upper, by virtue of what they are wearing, the upper classes must find some new visual sign with which to signal their social difference (Barnard, 1996). This account of how fashion works has been labelled the trickle down theory, because fashions are supposed to trickle down from the higher classes to the lower classes. This theory has been criticized by many scholars in the sense that it cannot account for fashions that do not emanate from the elite, upper classes; it cannot account for the ways in which different and various class groups, ethnic groups and gender groups, for example, may be the. 40.

(48) origin of fashions. It cannot explain either the popular fashion or the mass-market fashion system (Parlington, 1992). Davis points out that one weakness of the trickle down theory is that it assumes that fashion is concerned only with symbolizing social class, whereas it actually is about all sorts of other identities; sexual, gender, age, ethnic, religious and so on (Davis, 1992). Davis notes Blumer’s criticisms of the trickle down theory. Rather than fashions being adopted in order to demonstrate social prestige, Blumer sees the spread of fashion as being to do with collective selection. “Fashion is seen, not as a response to class differentiation and emulation, but in response to a wish to be in fashion… to express new tastes, which are emerging in a changing world. And these wishes may be found in all classes, not only among the elite” (Blumer quoted in Davis 1992: 116).. Veblen (1899) offers three norms or principles with which to explain the changing of fashions. He argues that the ‘great and dominant norm of dress’ is the principle of conspicuous waste’. The second norm is the principle of conspicuous leisure, and the third is the principle that dress must be up to date. By ‘waste’ he refers generally to expenditure that ‘does not serve human life or human well being on the whole’ (p.78). Wasteful expenditure on fashion is greatly increased, he says, if each garment is to be worn only for a short period of time (Veblen, 1899). According to this view, fashion consists of a series of imperatives to change one’s garments as soon as they are no longer up to date. Clearly, if the garments worn in one season are discarded before the next season begins, then there will be a lot of garments that are not worn until they are worn out and this may be characterised as waste. Clearly,. 41.

(49) the ability to replace one’s dress in such a way is evidence of one’s wealth, or pecuniary strength as Veblen has it.. Like Veblen, Simmel sees the fashion as belonging to the upper class in the society. He asserts that the fashions are abandoned by the upper class as soon as the lower classes appropriate them. He has mentioned that fashion is both about conformity and differentiation. He says: “Fashion is the imitation of a given example and satisfies the demand for social adaptation…at the same time it satisfies in no less degree the need of differentiation…Fashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change” (Simmel, 1971: 296).. Simmel argues that the clothing in primitive societies is more stable because they value conformity and union as opposed to isolation and difference like civilized races do. Among primitive races fashions will be less numerous and more stable because the need of new impressions and forms of life, quite apart from their social effect, is far less pressing. Simmel suggests that women are adherents of fashion because they are naive and more faithful than men are. He argues that women’s psychological characteristic in so far as it differs from that of man, consists in a lack of differentiation, in a greater similarity among different members of her sex, in a stricter adherence to the social average. The relation and weakness of her social position, to which woman has been doomed during the far greater portion of the. 42.