Fashion is a term for the clothing, footwear, accessories, and makeup that reflects a particular culture or community at a given time. It is also the multibillion-dollar industry that creates and follows these trends. Fashion can also mean the style of a person’s appearance, including their hairstyle and body posture. It can even refer to the way that a room or a house is decorated.
What is considered fashionable varies considerably from one person to another and across cultures and generations. The style of a person’s clothes can be influenced by the social class they belong to, their age, occupation and geographic location. Fashions can also be influenced by the latest music or other cultural icons. People may follow a celebrity’s fashion and begin wearing similar clothes, or they may copy the look of someone that they admire or respect. Fashions can also change over time and become outdated or go out of style. This is what gives rise to the term fashion victim, for someone who slavishly follows fashions without thinking for themselves or considering their impact on the environment.
While some fashions are created by haute couture designers and are sold in high-end stores, the vast majority of the styles that people wear are mass-produced and designed for mass consumption. This mass production and consumption leads to wasteful overproduction and waste of natural resources, which is a significant contributor to climate change. It also exacerbates socioeconomic disparity in the world as poorer communities are often unable to keep up with the fast changing fashions that the rich consume.