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Conflicts Of Fashion Theory: The Conspicuous Consumption Model

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2.44 b The Scarcity Model:

Objects that are rare, scarce, or in short supply can have special value and thus command the highest prices. They offer their owners prestige and social recognition, for by possessing them we possess something novel and something others do not have. In the economist‘s terms, we show control over factors of production. In this manner scarcity or limited supply is equated with desirability and high price.

2.44c The “Conspicuous Consumption Model:

This is the economist’s view of the sociologist’s trickle down theory. It suggest that the rising wealthy classes’ desire to display their growing prosperity through conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, and conspicuous waste. The better way to consume conspicuously …show more content…

The fashion process is viewed as competition between these two types of symbols. Conflicts of fashion versus anti-fashion are most likely to occur in societies experiencing major social changes, mobility and competition for status among cultural groups. In this manner the cultural view integrates with a more social view of fashion, and proposes a political (power-seeking, social status) aspect of fashion as well.

2.45c The “Cultural Production Systems” Model:

This model focuses on social and economic forces that produce new cultural symbols. Essentially it proposes that new cultural systems are produced by teams of subsystems including:
1) a creator of the new symbol,
2) a manager of distribution, and
3) a communicator who spreads the symbolic meaning of the new object to consumers.
For example, a rock group, a record company, and advertising agency constitute a team. Though not yet applied to fashion, this model seems appropriate since fashion is a symbolic product increasingly produced and marketed around symbolic themes (e.g.; fashion symbolizes life-styles).

2.46 Geographic

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