We're going to chat. about this for the Quackcast this Saturday.

Is it better to follow the whims of constant changing fashion or to do your own thing and go with that?
Obviously I go for the latter but it's more complicated

People's style choices are often based on what used to be a fashion but they just latched onto it and made it their own, building on it- or else they simply follow it out of habit, stuck in a rut. Or maybe their style choice is wholly their own and not directly related to any fashion?

Often when people pick a style that used to be in fashion and build on it, it's because it's fully developed- The height of a certain trend. So in THAT way it's very different and superior to someone who follows the latest trends because they'll always be latching onto half-arsed stuff and then discarding it before it gets good. Conversely, someone who only uses older fashions can look twee, kitsch, and outdated.

- This can be about fashions in ANYTHING, clothes, music, ART: drawing, comics, lettering, panel style, colour style, layouts, composition, writing styles etc.

I've always just dressed the way I like . . . weather permitting. Like Bill Cosby, I dig sweaters, but unfortunately, where I live, sweater weather is barely three months out of the entire year, so that just makes me yearn for such weather all the more. Otherwise, my clothing of choice is a pique polo and sweatpants . . . yes, sweatpants . . . I don't care if once upon a time they were considered socially unacceptable; we've gotten to a point in our society where most people (mostly Millennials) are too lazy to dress themselves that they just wear their pajamas out in public, so who's to say we can't wear sweatpants in public?

I did once unintentionally start a fashion trend in the late 2000s in my area: that was when I started wearing my “Radar O'Reilly hat,” and by the winter of 2007, almost everybody in town was wearing them, in a variety of differenyt colors and patterns - it was so wild! Actually, since then, I have literally only ever seen two other people wear one in the exact same color and pattern of the original; one I assumed was a grizzled old war veteran, and the other was a hipster about my age in a co-op market.

There is one last thing I really want to address: when the hell are skinny jeans going to stop being a thing? Seriously! We're practically halfway through the 2020s already, the 2010s are long over; 1970s bell bottoms stopped being a thing in the 80s, it's past time 2010s skinny jeans stop being a thing!

hah! the skinny jeans comment feeds nicely to some of my thoughts. Fashion makes idiots of people. Like guys that really can't pull them off wearing skinny jeans. Fashions and trends are fine, but no one should be a slave to them. That way you get fant4stic 4, endless films trying to ape matrix action scenes, the MCU eating itself trying to make everything like guardians of the galaxy. Or loads of excessive violence and nudity because it worked for game of thrones. Clothing fashion… well ozone does his thing and it works for him, this is probably the advice I'd give to most people. Do what works for you and your physique, if you want to follow fashions, tweak it for you and don't follow blindly.

There was an online comic fashion a while back that came to be known as ‘Tumblr nose’, where everyone was drawing their OCs with noses in various shades of red. This used to signify a character who was drunk all the time, so happily it doesn't seem to be so much of a thing now. Likewise semi-opaque word balloons, which I don't see often now.

I don't know if I'd call it a fashion, but the rise of the lower case font in comics makes for more lettering options. Back in the days when comic conventions were set they weren't practical to print but now they work great. I always loved the look of them with Posy Simmonds' stuff.

About clothes fashion, one could make an argument that clothes are a language that explain who you are, and like all language it is based on a social convention.
However as people tend to try to show off “cool” markers became inflationed and this starts new trends/fashions.
I'm super lazy and therefore dress with the same clothes I had 20 years ago (untile they crumble into dust) anyway.

Also, the philosophy of fashion: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23060.The_Fashion_System

Ironscarf wrote:
There was an online comic fashion a while back that came to be known as ‘Tumblr nose’, where everyone was drawing their OCs with noses in various shades of red. This used to signify a character who was drunk all the time, so happily it doesn't seem to be so much of a thing now. Likewise semi-opaque word balloons, which I don't see often now.

I don't know if I'd call it a fashion, but the rise of the lower case font in comics makes for more lettering options. Back in the days when comic conventions were set they weren't practical to print but now they work great. I always loved the look of them with Posy Simmonds' stuff.

We talk a bit about that in today's Quackcast :)

I'll slowly respond to all these as I have time.

marcorossi wrote:
About clothes fashion, one could make an argument that clothes are a language that explain who you are, and like all language it is based on a social convention.
However as people tend to try to show off “cool” markers became inflationed and this starts new trends/fashions.
I'm super lazy and therefore dress with the same clothes I had 20 years ago (untile they crumble into dust) anyway.

Very interesting.
And you're Italian, a culture traditionally quite concerned with design and fashion… at least that's the reputation.
That's something I never really believed in till I got a couple of WW2 books:
One was about battleships from all the different major powers (who were the only ones who could afford battleship class warships), the other was about WW2 uniforms of all the major powers.
A very interesting thing I learned was that the Italian military cared MASSIVELY about design! In contrast to all other militarys their uniforms reflected the cutting edge of modernist design. No one else was as modern AND style concious.
- certainly NOT the Germans, who although they get that reputation their styles are almost all extremely retro, about 30 years behind everyone else.

Even the Italian Battleships like The Roma reflect beautiful design principals and a lot of attention was very obviously applied to how they look quite above the needs of simple practicality and expedience.

I can confirm that Italians tend to be quite fashion conscious, though personally I'm not and it isn't a national trait that I like a lot.

RE: fashionable WW2 navy suits, historical italian fascism was very big on modernism and so it was culturally linked to many modernist trends (like futurism for example), so that might have been part of propaganda.

During italian unification there was the perception that Italy was a backwater country (linked to the idea it was dominated by foreigners), and that the unification was going to modernize Italy.
Fascism took the rethoric of italian unification and amped it up at 110%, so it was very proud of its technological achievements like trains arriving on time (actually due to the fact that before fascism there was a standardisation of italian railways, that previously were built on different standards), of Italo Balbo flying across the atlantic with seaplanes etc.; so while it mostly was a conservative regime and used classic conservative rethoric (like referring to the gloey days of the roman empire and similar stuff) it was also very modernist in terms of technology, even in propaganda.

German WW2 uniforms were about tradition. The uniforms had remained mostly unchanged since Bismarck's time. Some of the field gear was unchanged since the Napoleonic Wars and indeed except for materials remained unchanged in the East German army. (The mess kit and basic canteen.) The collar insignia was from Prussian guard uniforms going back to Frederick the Great.
However in the field of camouflage the Germans were innovators with a camouflaged poncho before WW2 and the various smocks and uniforms of the war. A great deal of it still being used by border defense troops the Bundeswehr was formed from. Then there is the flecked uniform used today with its patterns close to SS uniforms of WW2. Those flecked uniforms inspired the digital camouflage prevalent among modern armies.

And then there's the US Army whose dress uniform recalled the American Civil War (blue with the gold stripes) and now is a modernized copy of the WW2 “pinks and greens” For a time it really was cool to see Cavalry and armor officers with sabers, stetsons and the blue uniform. Looks a little strange with the WW2 brown olive drab and khaki.

But that's military fashion. A biazzare mix of tradition and innovation, practicality and blind stubborn adherence to long outdated traditions.

The Centauri in Babylon 5 were the best-dressed Italians of that future. Earthmen uniforms by comparison were just basic. We should have had more gold braid and fur-trimmed cloaks. That's how you earn respect.