Bitcoin Will Change The Way We Dress
Today’s fast and high fashion bleeds resources without producing aesthetically pleasing designs. Let’s examine why contemporary clothing is so ugly and why Bitcoin will fix it.
Today’s fashion world sometimes seems crazy. From urban wear in the forms of oversized pullovers and cargo pants for a couple of thousand dollars to even the most extreme aberrations of taste proudly presented by the most famous designers in the industry, there is almost nothing exotic enough to be at least tried as a potential viral design. The times are already over when fashion comes four times a year, and big chains like Zara or H&M rock out many more collections than there are seasons per year.
Oscar Wilde already noted long before our current days:
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Such a rant is nothing new to many; some might have even thought the same themselves. A topic worth some attention might be pondering the connection between how our fashion works and that we are operating on a soft money fiat standard.
What is time preference?
Time preference is an essential concept in Austrian Economics. Although it is crucial, one can quickly get an intuitive grasp of the idea. Let’s do a simple thought experiment: Imagine I was willing to give you 100$ now, or 100$ plus a certain amount X in a year. Now we try to find the value for X that would make you willing to wait for an entire year. Time preference quantifies someone’s preference for the presence compared to the future. In Austrian Economics, the primary interpretation of time preference is the average interest rate in a free capital market.
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It is important to note that the X will always be a positive number. This is due to the fact that the future is always, at least to a certain degree, uncertain. For example, you might not be alive in a year, so what good was waiting for your interest to pile up? One can infer the preference level for the present compared to the future depending on how high the X is.
Imagine a crack hat who urgently craves his next shot. He will almost exclusively take the 100$, almost wholly independent of what you were to offer him additionally for the waiting time. He needs the 100$ now to fulfill his urge to buy additional drugs. At the same time, the lower the additional amount of money for the personal restrain on consumption is, the lesser somebody discounts his future for the present.
As a last note, the economist and philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe identifies the lowering of time preference with the process of civilizing itself. The idea is that when people prefer the present less and less towards the future, they will be more inclined to act upon decisions that lead to a more flourishing and sustainable future. From the perspective of Austrian economics and most people in the Bitcoin-Sphere, we live in a high time preference culture. I agree with this assessment and argue in the following that this has also implications for our consumption and philosophical preference in fashion.
Why is there fashion?
Fashion is essential for marking and identifying the social-economical status of people in a society. The king, for example, might be identified by the robe he is wearing. In the day and age of modernism and modern democracies, you can no longer determine the social-economical status of a person by looking at the type of clothes they are wearing. The richest of the rich wear T-Shirts, sweaters, and jeans just as the debt-beaten student from around the corner.
While democracies operate on the philosophical notion of the sameness of everyone, in reality, people are not the same. Because of this, there is still the need for the identification of the social-economical status of somebody. Think about it like that: If you have a daughter, you may want her to marry somebody successful, well-groomed, and orderly. While this doesn’t promise you a perfect match for your daughter, such properties help to increase the odds of finding somebody suitable. Judging how people appear in society is the first heuristic in evaluating that person’s competencies and character.
When the type of clothing no longer communicates social-economical status, how else is it supposed to be communicated otherwise? An alternative could be found in the introduction and employment of trends. Trends usually employ specific colors, certain shapes, and obvious traits to distinguish clothes. A trend must at least be different from its predecessors to such a high degree that it can be easily identified. Resulting is not just a T-Shirt, but a T-Shirt that is en vogue for the current season.
Of course, clothes usually function for a while, especially when they are of decent quality and are worn and handled carefully. For practical reasons, there is no need to wear the clothes of the current trend. The point of purchasing clothes from the recent collections is to be identified as somebody who can buy the latest clothes. The clothes communicate to the peers that one can purchase clothes for every trend, which simultaneously signifies a higher social-economical status.
Why are there brands?
The whole concept of brands plays into the theme described earlier. While most of today’s fashion brands have a great tradition in craftsmanship and have built their reputation through their works over time, it is no longer their essential reason for recognition.
We usually recognize names, companies, etc., because we want to solve different problems in our life. As those problems can be very different and nuanced, we often need somebody else to help us or perform the task. For example, suppose you are looking for an excellent doctor to fix your broken knee. In that case, only a few people can competently help you solve your problem, so a social marking system is of great benefit to everyone for enabling the identification of competent people in their respective domains of expertise.
The original marking purpose of brands is derived from a similar line of argumentation. If you are looking for an excellent accessory or a sturdy and exquisite piece of clothing, you need to find someone who can provide it. As only a tiny portion of the population possesses the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools to produce such things, marking who can do it dramatically benefits everyone. Louis Vuitton, for example, started as a company that provided excellent traveling gear for the luxurious train passenger. There was no suitable alternative at the beginning of the train-traveling era, so Louis Vuitton created new products of high quality and elegant taste to fulfill their customers’ desires.
In today’s fashion world, this traditional valuing of outstanding craftsmanship and innovative design is no longer the essential ingredient to rise to the highest levels of popularity. Popularity itself became the core value. There are already fashion brands that are solely famous for being famous. Take Supreme, for example. The success of Supreme is more due to their ability to go viral in the contemporary pop cultural framework and less to their ingenuine creation of new products and uncompromising quality.
When one understands that wearing clothes still has to fulfill the function of social marking, it becomes clear why popularity becomes a significant selling point; after all, broad recognition is the base for a social marking system. As popular brands are trivially popular, people know how much they cost and how hard it is to get them. People wearing such clothes are easily identifiable by their peers and show that they have the economic firepower and social connections to access those kinds of clothing.
Copy-cats and the need for a fast cycle in fashion
As wearing popular fashion brands brings you the recognition of being part of high social-economical standing, there are benefits to be gained from wearing them. As a man, you might more easily attract the attention of women who identify you as a high-quality man with high economic fidelity, or you might get easier or special access to restaurants, bars, clubs, and of course, other people of high social-economical standing might identify you as one of their peers. So there can also be a social networking benefit connected to it.
Because of those benefits, you will find copycats trying to get the same recognition without spending ridiculous amounts of money. Of course, when more and more copycats employ the current trends in their fashion, the differentiation potential of a trend declines, and a new trend must be set.
For the copycats, it is all about speed. Back in the day, fashion came out four times a year following the cycle of the seasons, which makes intuitive sense, following the cycle of the seasons with their different weathers. Those days are long gone, and new trends always pop up. A copycat will use the optimization of a logistical network to become faster and faster in presenting the current trends for a lower price. Companies like Zara or H&M would ideally have the Berlin Fashion Week today and their interpretation of the show’s haute couture readily available in their stores the next day.
This leads to an arms race between trendsetters and copycats. The copycats try to become better and better at copying and delivering their copies to a broad audience for affordable prices. In the meantime, trendsetters must increase the speed of their publishing cycles, as their trends lose value when more copies circulate.
To understand the grotesqueness of today’s fashion and the sheer disrespect for harmony in design and feeling for good coloring or shaping is best understood through the lens of this arms race. New trends appear more frequently, and designers must account for this. The exaggeration and hyperbolizing in contemporary high fashion come primarily from the fact that the latest trends must still be distinguishable from their predecessors. Achieving this goal must necessarily become harder over time when more trends join the fray in even shorter periods. Distinctive features must pop out in an almost autistic way for the trend to still be able to serve its purpose. This also explains why good fashion today almost knows no limits anymore in the extremeness and radicalness of their designs. Extremeness and radicalness become something good in themselves, as was the case with the popularity of brands.
It is all about recognition. The quality and originality of brand design became utterly disconnected from their popularity. Popularity itself is the only important currency in this game. The same is true for the extremeness of trend design. There is no longer a need for aesthetic justification of extreme design choices. Only the ability to be distinguishable is crucial so that the trend better serves its purpose of enabling social marking.
Fashion paradigms and money
The above-described paradigm of contemporary high and fast fashion is not a necessary attitude towards fashion in general. There, of course, is also the idea of timeless fashion for people who don’t enjoy going to the popular brands but to the good sartorialists, the good shoemakers, the good watchmakers, etc. Of course, this all still exists, but it is generally a way smaller market than the high fashion market.
The critical difference between being en vogue and avant-garde on the one side and being timeless in your fashion choice on the other is primarily due to a philosophical difference. For somebody who chooses to walk the path of timeless fashion, the wardrobe is something that must be built over time. As classical design operates on long-lasting aesthetical ideals, the possibilities of combination are high. Sharing the same aesthetical principles, the compatibility between different pieces from different workmen and even different countries is equally high. This is why only a few pieces usually go out of fashion. Often pieces accompany their wearers for a long time, if not their whole life, as high-quality craftsman generally makes them with equally high quality.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be luxuriously expensive, but as the classical pieces are high in quality, they usually come with a certain price tag. In this case, though, one is paying for high-quality products rather than for what is essentially something that marks you socially around your peers. A wardrobe that is based on timeless fashion is being built over time and will only grow bigger and dress the person who starts building it better and better over time.
High and timeless fashion attitudes correspond beautifully to the concept of time preference, as we have seen earlier. High fashion is always limited to a brief time as the trends progress fast. Timeless fashion is about building a wardrobe over time so that the piece one buys today lasts and becomes more valuable over time as one acquires more and more pieces to combine.
In a high time preference society, high and fast fashion will flourish. Under such circumstances, it is more important to consume today’s fashion, which might grant you quick access to social benefits because you mark yourself for peer recognition. In a low time preference society, people will more often choose to build wardrobes over time and develop a unique appearance due to an acquired individual taste for higher-quality clothing and accessories.
The attitude towards fashion plays a role if you look at the resources invested in the fashion industry. Fast trends and equally fast fashion needs a steady supply of more and more resources to produce them. First of all, it should be noted that the pieces’ short lifespan doesn’t necessitate using high-quality craftsmanship and resources because it would only be a waste for the short lifespan of the respective designs. In timeless fashion, you aim for fewer and better pieces, which leads to better and more long-lasting use of resources. Over time, people following timeless fashion will look like someone with way more clothes than high fashion people, even though they only bought a fraction of the pieces and only used a fraction of the resources.
Last but not least, fashion and design should be about fashion and design. Due to the raw value of popularity in fast and high fashion, special events and marketing take up huge chunks of the companies’ respective budgets. All those resources should be invested in refining design, workers, and product quality.
Bitcoin will change the way we dress
There exists a connection between the concept of time preference and the money system employed by an economy. Fiat money systems tend to increase the time preference in society, while hard money standards based on gold or Bitcoin would lower the time preference. Fiat money is inflated over time, as it is easily produced by government decree. Hard money like gold or Bitcoin cannot be printed on demand. A lot of work is involved in creating them, so their circulation remains more stable.
People need to save to lower their time preferences. The safer people feel, the lower their time preference becomes. Economic fears will decrease the more savings one has accumulated over time. The sweet spot will lie somewhere else for everyone, but saving generally reduces time preference.
An inflated money standard makes saving harder, as the already earned money bleeds value over time. An increasing money base makes it harder to satisfy one’s need for safety and, by extension, works contrary to lowering the time preference. The argumentation is the same but vice versa for hard money. Saving becomes more effortless, and the need for safety can be satisfied more easily. Satisfying the need for safety will lower the time preference.
A world based on a Bitcoin standard will continually lower the time preference. In such a world, people will act more in anticipation of a future that needs to be embraced. No longer will such people long for fast high fashion that costs a lot of money and bleeds resources as well as aesthetics. Low time preference people will prefer wardrobe building to increase their aesthetics over time as a long-lasting goal.
It might not be obvious at first glance, but Bitcoin will change the way we dress.
Sources
[1] Hoppe, Hans-Hermann: Democracy — The God That Failed (2001)
[2] Ammous, Dr. Saifedean: The Bitcoin Standard (2018)
[3] Ammous, Dr. Saifedean: The Bitcoin Standard (Podcast)
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