The Fashion Industry Has Been Following You Around For Decades

There's a version of the fashion world that looks something like this: a French designer sketches something extraordinary in a Parisian atelier, it appears on the runway, gets photographed, filters down through department stores, and eventually lands in your wardrobe about three years later. The industry quite likes this version of itself. It makes for a better story.

The trouble is, for a huge chunk of the last century, it has been almost completely back to front.

When did jeans stop being workwear and become fashion?

Levi Strauss originally made denim jeans in the 1870s as workwear – tough, cheap, indigo-dyed because it hid the dirt. For most of the following century, fashion treated them as the clothes you wore when you weren't wearing clothes. Then American teenagers in the 1950s started wearing them as a small act of rebellion. James Dean followed. And then the entire Western world decided they were the coolest thing imaginable.

Designers didn't lead that. They watched it happen, then spent the next three decades slowly incorporating denim into collections and eventually charging several hundred pounds for a deliberately distressed version of the thing miners once wore down a hole.

Trainers Did the Same Thing, Only Louder

Running shoes were athletic equipment. Then hip-hop culture in New York during the late 1970s and 1980s turned them into something else entirely – Adidas shell-toes, Nike Air Force 1s, worn clean and without laces. Street style in the most literal sense, born in the Bronx, worn as a mark of community and pride.

High fashion ignored this for years, occasionally looking down its nose at it. Then, slowly and without quite admitting what it was doing, it started borrowing the shapes, the colourways, the whole aesthetic. By the time luxury brands began releasing their own trainers at eye-watering prices in the 1990s and beyond, they were selling back to the street what the street had invented. The most expensive pair of "sneakers" you can buy today is a direct descendant of something fashion once refused to acknowledge.

Do designers set trends, or just copy the street?

The trickle-down theory of fashion was written down properly by a sociologist called Georg Simmel in 1904. He argued that lower classes imitate the upper classes, who then move on to something new to maintain distinction. It's a tidy model. It also doesn't explain jeans, trainers, workwear jackets, hoodies, baseball caps, or most of what any designer has found exciting in the last fifty years.

What the street actually does is stress-test style in public, over years, without a marketing budget. By the time something arrives at a runway, it has already survived. The designer's contribution is often less invention and more translation – taking a cleaned-up, expensively manufactured version of an idea someone else already proved worked.

Fashion is brilliant at many things. Admitting where it got its best ideas isn't really one of them.