Fashion
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In crude terms fashion is a style of living. There are aristocratic fashions, film-style fashions, peasant class fashions and a kind of fashion known as maverick fashion. Naturally it is related to dress and manners. But manners imply something deeper than fashions. Because fashion is comparatively superficial, and changes with the winds of change in certain races and people.
At one time Paris dictated fashions in dress. Today, however, the climate has changed. In India the film world dominates and craze for the queer and the unconventional is gaining ground. The styles of dressing are always in a fluid state, and before one fashion sets a foothold another pushes it out. New films pop up every year with queer innovations in dress, the young ladies promptly copy them, and the tailor masters make new bucks fast, and thereby hang a tale. Let alone young maidens, even elderly ladies are lured by the new fashion.
Today the modern improvement in cosmetics claim to make the old hags and frumps look tolerably young and smart. Why then should one lag behind and submit to the ravages of time and age? Thus fashion craze has banished sobriety.
Among men the fashion trend does not remain confined to smartness only. The maverick style infects a class. They wear steel bangles, put on crystal necklaces and even wear earring in one ear.
Life has become fast and distrust for tradition is becoming a cult today. But today smoking and even drinking is no taboo in some societies. The joint families today are in ruins, and even the family units are slack and sloppy. Naturally parental care, affection and family discipline become the severest victims of changing fashion.
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Changing Fashions
Fashions are constantly changing. They never remain the same. Much money is spent by people to buy things that are of the latest fashion. People follow fashion because they like novelty. The same old things do not please them. They like to be fashionably dressed so that people might notice them.
There is nothing really new about fashions. The same old fashions come back as new fashions after a number of years. For example it was the fashion for men in the 16th and 17th centuries to have long hair.
Today the same fashion of long hair for men has come back. In the 19th century, the age of Queen Victoria, men used to keep side locks. Modern young men too keep long side burns. They wore tight trousers then which are once more commonly seen today.
Western fashions are becoming more and more popular with our young people. Girls are seen in miniskirts and maxis, in embroidered jeans and trousers. Boys and girls tend to dress alike as they do in foreign countries. Boys have begun to wear all kinds of bright and colourful clothes as they did in the days of Queen Elizabeth I.
Even in the matter of shoes fashions keep on revolving from pointed to square and round toe type of shoes and, back again in a cyclic form.
Man should not be the slave of fashion but its master. People should adjust fashion to suit them instead of blindly following any kind of fashion. They should try to follow fashion and yet be decently dressed. There is no sense in sacrificing one character for the sake off fashion.
