The Queen - Matt Ridley

THE FASHION BUSINESS

We are back at a familiar paradox. Evolutionists and art historians agree that fashion is all about status. In their dress, women follow fashion more than men do: Yet women seek clues to status, which change with fashion, and men seek clues to fertility, which do not.

Men should not care less what women wear as long as they are smooth-skinned, slim, young, healthy, and generally nubile: Women should care greatly about what men wear because it tells them a good deal about their background, their wealth, their social status, even their ambitions. So why do women follow clothes fashions more avidly than men?

I can think of several answers to this question. First, the theory is simply wrong, and men prefer status symbols, whereas women prefer bodies. Perhaps, but that flies in the face of an awful lot of robust evidence: Second, women 's fashion is not about status after all: Third, modern Western societies have been in a two-century aberration from which they are just emerging: In Regency England, Louis XIV 's France, medieval Christendom, ancient Greece, or among modern Yanomamo, men followed fashion as avidly as women: Men wore bright colors, flowing robes, jewels, rich materials, gorgeous uniforms, and gleaming, decorated armor.

The damsels that knights rescued were no more fashionably attired than their paramours. Only in Victorian times did the deadly uniformity of the black frock coat and its dismal modern descendant, the gray suit, infect the male sex, and only in this century have women 's hemlines gone up and down like yo-yos: This suggests the fourth and most intriguing explanation, which is that women do care more about clothes and men do care less, but instead of influencing the other sex with their concerns,

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they influence their own. Each gender uses its own preferences to guide its own behavior. Experiments show that men think women care about physique much more than they actually do; women think men care about status cues much more than they actually do. So perhaps each sex simply acts out its instincts in the conviction that the other sex likes the same things as they do.

One experiment seems to support the idea that men and women mistake their own preferences for those of the opposite sex.

April Fallon and Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania showed four simple line drawings of male or female figures in swimsuits to nearly five hundred undergraduates. In each case the figures differed only in thinness: They asked the subjects to indicate their current figure, their ideal figure, the figure that they considered most attractive to the opposite sex, and the figure they thought most attractive in the opposite sex. Men 's current, ideal, and attractive figures were almost identical; men are, on average, content with their figures. Women, as expected, were far heavier than what they thought most attractive to men, which was heavier still than their own ideal. But intriguingly, both sexes erred in their estimation of what the other sex most likes. Men think women like a heavier build than they do; women think men like women thinner than they do:''

However, such confusions cannot be the whole explanation of why women follow fashion because it does not work for other features of attraction. Women are far more concerned with their own youth than men despite the fact that they mostly do not themselves seek younger partners.

And yet the notion that fashion is about status revolts us in a democratic age. We pretend instead that fashion is actually about showing off a body to best advantage. New fashions are worn by gorgeous models, and perhaps women buy them because they subconsciously credit the beauty to the dress and not the model.

Surveys reveal what everybody knows: Men are attracted by women in revealing, tight, or skimpy clothing; women are less attracted by such clothing on men. Most female fashions are more or less explicitly designed to enhance beauty; for example, a gigantic crinoline made a waist look small simply by contrast. A woman is careful THE USES OF BEAUTY

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to choose clothes that "suit" her particular figure or hair color.

Moreover, since most men grow up seeing women dressed and spend their critical periods seeing clothed women, their ideals of beauty include images of clothed women as well as naked ones.

Havelock Ellis recounted the story of a boy who, standing before a painting of the Judgment of Paris, was asked which goddess he thought was the most beautiful: He replied: "I can't tell because they haven 't their clothes on: ""

But the most characteristic feature of fashion, today at least, is its obsession with novelty. We have already seen how Bell thinks this comes about, as the trendsetters try to escape their vul-gar imitators: Low thinks the key to women's fashion is novelty.

"Any conspicuous display which signals the ability to read fashion trends " is a clue to a woman's status. 38 Being the first in fashion is certainly a status symbol among women. Without the ability to induce constant obsolescence, fashion designers would be a lot less rich than they are.

This brings us back to the shifting sands of cultural standards of beauty. Beauty cannot be commonplace in a monogamous species like man; it must stand out: Men are discriminating because they will get the chance to marry only one or perhaps two women, so they are always interested in the best they can get, never in the ordinary. In a crowd of women all wearing black, the single one in red would surely catch the eye of a man, whatever her figure or face was like.

The very word fashion used to mean something between conformity and custom, where now it means novelty and modernity: Remarking on painful corsets and the hypocrisy of low necklines in a puritanical society, Quentin Bell observed: "The case against the fashion is always a strong one; why is it then that it never results in an effective verdict? Why is it that both public opinion and formal regulations are invariably set at nought, while sartorial custom, which consists in laws that are imposed without formal sanctions, is obeyed with wonderful docility, and this despite the fact that its laws are unreasonable, arbitrary, and not infrequently cruel.""

I am left feeling that this puzzle is, in the present state of

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evolutionary and sociological thinking, insoluble. Fashion is change and obsolescence imposed on a pattern of tyrannical conformity.

Fashion is about status, and yet the sex that is obsessed with fashion is trying to impress the sex that cares least about status: THE FOLLY OF SEXUAL PERFECTIONISM

Whatever determines sexual attraction, the Red Queen is at work: If for most of human history beautiful women and dominant men had more children than their rivals—which they surely did because the dominant men chose beautiful wives, and together they lived off the toil of their rivals—then in each generation women became that little bit more beautiful and men that little bit more dominant: But their rivals did, too, being descendants of the same successful couples. So standards rose, too: A beautiful woman needed to shine still more brightly to stand out in the new firmament: And a dominant man needed to bully or scheme still more mercilessly to get his way. Our senses are easily dulled by the commonplace, however exceptional it may seem elsewhere or at other times: As Charles Darwin put it, "If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characters in our women a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard. "'° This, incidentally, is as concise a statement as could be made for why eugenics would never work: A page later Darwin describes the Jollof tribe of West Africa, famous for the beauty of its women; it deliberately sold its ugly women into slavery. Such Nazi eugenics would indeed gradually raise the level of beauty in the tribe, but the men 's subjective standards of beauty would rise as fast: Since beauty is an entirely subjective concept, the Jollofs were doomed to perpetual disappointment: