The increasing uniformity of clothing that you observe, Johan, must surely have a lot to do with its increasing cheapness and availability. Take women’s clothing. Up to quite recently most women made their own clothes (only the rich could afford to buy ready made). Home production meant a lot of individuality. Now very few women sew. They buy from big companies producing identical items. Where individuality used to be the cheap option, now the cheap option is conformity. The loss of individualism in women’s clothing also isn’t a simple matter of the cost of deviating being high. In the days of home sewing, there was in fact pressure to deviate – it was a social disaster for a woman to find herself in company with another woman wearing the same dress as her. Today it's no big deal. I think there are many complicating factors for a study that tries to link individuality in clothing to inventiveness and creativity.
The increasing uniformity of clothing that you observe, Johan, must surely have a lot to do with its increasing cheapness and availability. Take women’s clothing. Up to quite recently most women made their own clothes (only the rich could afford to buy ready made). Home production meant a lot of individuality. Now very few women sew. They buy from big companies producing identical items. Where individuality used to be the cheap option, now the cheap option is conformity. The loss of individualism in women’s clothing also isn’t a simple matter of the cost of deviating being high. In the days of home sewing, there was in fact pressure to deviate – it was a social disaster for a woman to find herself in company with another woman wearing the same dress as her. Today it's no big deal. I think there are many complicating factors for a study that tries to link individuality in clothing to inventiveness and creativity.