LACK OF FASHION AS A SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPT

THIS article is an invitation to sociologists to take seriously on the topic of fashion. Only a handful of scholars, such as Simmel(1904), Sapir(1931), and the Larigs(1961), have given more than relaxed concern to the topic.

Their individual analyses about it, while illuminating in several respects, have been limited in scope, and within the chosen limits very imprecise.

The treatment of the topic by sociologists in general, such as we often find it in textbooks & in occasional parts of a scholarly writing is even more lacking in substance. The major lack or deficiencies in the conventional sociological treatment are easily noted a failure to observe and appreciate the wide range of operation of fashion; a false assumption that fashion has only trivial or peripheral/unimportant significance. A dramatically wrong idea that fashion falls in the area of the abnormal and irrational and thus is out of the mainstream of human group life and finally a misunderstanding of the nature of fashion.