Fashion facilitates economic growth by providing consumers twin opportunities: to periodically liquidate their dated fashion goods, especially those that may have been consumption mistakes, as they abandon old fashion rules and adopt new ones; and to consume alternative goods that, thanks to standardisation, cater for the varying risk preferences of consumers. This process may seem wasteful from a static account, but it is dynamically efficient in the promotion change and re-coordination that eventually registers as economic growth. Rather than being merely a feature of bourgeois leisure, engaging with fashion trends might be better understood as a process of creative destruction that works through social pressure to provide a fresh and self-regulated impetus for consumer learning. Fashion cycles work to periodically loosen accumulated constraints on the demand side, facilitating economic growth and personal development. Fashion is part of how economies evolve, not of how they decay. It is another name for consumer entrepreneurship: and the more we have of that, the better.
