Fashion as part of youth culture
When a parent or grandparent sets out to buy fancy clothes for the teens in their lives, they often have trouble determining which trends to follow. Today, it seems that there are numerous trends in play at the same time. Haute couture lines have their definition of fashion. There is conventional fashion, which tends to appeal more to adults than teenagers. And then there are youth-focused trends like skinny jeans and snapbacks.
It used to be that the latest fashion trends were pretty well documented in fashion magazines, but nowadays that’s not necessarily the case. Now, the dynamics of fashion have changed drastically; fashion magazines are still the leaves of the high fashion industry, but that industry is getting a run for its money from a newly established style vanguard.
Youth style, and youth culture in general, has largely been taken over by a few entertainment moguls who have correctly estimated the power of spreading a celebrity’s drawing power across a variety of product lines. The star effect has been well known for a long time: if an attractive young star is out for a highly visible evening with friends and is carrying your bag, your bag will be the next big thing before the paparazzi have finished carrying all their bags. videos. images to the web.
Taking advantage of the star effect has been a great success. Instead of handing out all that free publicity to a bunch of little brands, stars stamp their names on products they love, allowing their brand to benefit when sales soar. Because young people tend to be more easily influenced by celebrity behavior, those who run these celebrity brands have locked themselves into youth culture.
Basically, they have taken over. Youth culture belongs almost entirely to that group of young, ultra-famous celebrities who have taken their fifteen minutes of fame and turned it into a brand with their fingers in every cake, from clothing to fragrance to jewelry.
Stars don’t design clothes any more than they mix fragrances. And those who do the design have discovered a market that is immensely easy to penetrate. Fashion choices are always about self-expression to some extent, and the bottom line most teens want to communicate is how they are different from their parents, their teachers, and the rest of the establishment. Everything a fashion trend needs to be is different. It doesn’t have to look good. You just have to break with tradition.
The mechanics of imprinting new fashion options on the culture have nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the design or the quality of the build. Scarily, they have more to do with how swarms of bees work than they do with using a sewing machine. A new fashion concept is simply placed in enough places that it suddenly becomes ubiquitous; as soon as you do, you will be successful.
Most of the time, when a parent or grandparent spends money on clothes for a teen, they want the teen to look good in those clothes. However, they have to accept that youth fashion is about something completely different. A snapback hat can look cool; skinny jeans may not look good; but those values are essentially irrelevant. The key to buying clothes that the teens in your life will like is to take them to the store and let them choose.