Some people think that fashion is so important for young people today and this causes bad effects to man and society. Do you agree or disagree?

Some people think that fashion is so important for young people today and this causes bad effects to man and society. Do you agree or disagree?

There has been much debate over the presence of high fashion in modern youth culture, especially with those who say it holds too much power leading to negative effects on personal health and societal morals. I partly understand this argument — yes, fashion can have negative effects and there’s plenty of documentation for that in certain areas — but I feel the case is overstated: we should not conclude that fast and cheap-fashion are evil for their own sake without considering the context when their influence can become truly toxic.

The alarms about the harmful influence of fashion on adolescents are based on legitimate and well-documented evidence. The most serious pertain to mental health and body image. Foremost, the fashion industry has been a historical promoter of thin and often biologically unrealistic body ideals that translate into aspirational standards of physical appearance adopted by impressionable young people leading to personality distress, disordered eating, and chronic low self-esteem — the real mental health problems. This is a notion that social media has surely exaggerated — the individualised exposure to ongoing visual comparing via curated, filtered and / or professionally styled fashion imagery creates a living environment of mind blowing scale and seriousness in comparison to what previous generations grew up with at anything like the same saturation or frequency.

Financial stress is another issue that can contribute negatively. In an era of rapid fashion cycles and peer acceptance seemingly dictated by the current season’s (or brand) must win items, youth and their families are faced with economic pressures that very often have little basis in the functional value to be derived from any given item. Having to miss out on trendy clothing can in fact be a form of social exclusion and cause feelings of shame for particularly young people from poorer backgrounds — an extremely damaging effect of a culture that attaches overly-high social importance to consumerism.

The environmental impact of fast fashion culture is also very serious. The contribution of the women, men and youths — who have been encouraged to take part in quickly cycling style developments — to the outstanding waste age, water use and carbon emissions characteristics of an industry which is one of the biggest and most naturally ruinous ventures on Earth. And it is really a huge deal how the values of an entire generation who will inherit the earth are framed around fashion versus responsible respect for nature.

But to write off young people’s engagement with fashion as it is here some sort of nerdy bad thing, in fact a harmful elaboration on the point, misses several other very important points about what its true value actually is. Fashion and personal style are valid means of identity expression, cultural association, and social communication — especially since your adolescence is when one of the most impactful developmental stages occurs: the stage of identity formation begins during this time (Ericson) and there is a lot of pressure to create a unique physical presence. The more important part of the article is that: appearance is an inherently human instinct, we must and should respect, not something to dismiss as superficial.

Fashion literacy also strengthens the cultural and creative aspects that are of real value. This immersion in design, visual vocabulary, cultural history and garment construction produce forms of visual literacy and creative sensibility that have meaning beyond the immediate context. Millions of creative professionals who work within fashion whose craft is a kind of applied fine art (tangible manifestation of human aesthetic culture).

I would argue the key distinction is between mindful, value-driven, proportional and significant fashion engagement — versus insecure peer-pressure driven mass-market consumption at the hands of an industry that naturally thrives from selling false perceptions of inadequacy to young people. The former is a transformative experience; the latter, an unmitigated evil. The right response is not to belittle the value of fashion but provide youth with the critical media literacy, financial education, and self-esteem resilience they need to engage with fashion on their own terms, rather than those dictated by commercial exploitation.

In short, I agree in parts with the negative effects of fashion on youth and society — specifically as it relates to body image, spending behaviour, consumption and waste. But the relevance of fashion to youth is not inherently bad; a more nuanced treatment that acknowledges both the pernicious aspects of fashion culture and its genuine expressive and creative value is intellectually sound and practically useful than leaving it at outright condemnation