Changing fashion is fashionable
Fashions change - regularly
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Thursday, 29, Mar 2007 12:01
Fashions change at a "surprisingly" steady rate, academics have found, with the latest research indicating that a demand for new innovations is what drives changing trends.
Working alongside researchers in the US, Durham University academic Dr Alex Bentley, has been able to show that fashions in everything from baby names to dog breeds change at a steady rate over time, no matter what the size of a population.
In an article in the latest edition of the Evolution and Human Behaviour journal, the anthropologist claims that fashions are driven by a minority of "innovators" who are subsequently randomly copied by the rest of society, causing trends to change "consistently" and at a predictable rate.
However Dr Bentley explains that because copying occurs at random, it is impossible to predict exactly which fashions will be adopted by the general population.
"It's like American Idol," he explained.
"We can predict the steady production of new winners from programme to programme, but the randomness means we can't forecast the particular winners themselves," he added.
Dr Bentley and his colleagues fashioned their random copying model by examining the Billboard top 200 chart and discovering that it turned over at a constant average rate in a 30-year period between the 1950s and 1980s.
During the entire period the average turnover of albums entering and leaving the chart each month was 5.6 per cent and the researchers found that turnover also remained consistently steady when they looked at changing trends in baby names and dog breeds.
Computer simulations of a random copying model also predicted that fashions change regularly and consistently over time.
However, Dr Bentley acknowledged that celebrity fashion innovators were likely to be copied much more than the random copying model would predict.
"David Beckham in the early 2000s was an innovator with his haircuts but it's change itself that is actually in demand, more or less regardless of content," he said.