Trend Resistant

Someone once made a peculiar remark that got me thinking about how other people's actions and preferences affect our own.

“Oh, you've got one of those foldable bikes too,” one woman said when she found out about my recent purchase and latest favorite weekend activity.

“Everybody has them these days, I should get myself one too.”

This struck me as rather odd: why buy a bicycle just because “everyone” has one? Shouldn’t you get it because you want to ride it?

I told her I actually bought the bike because I liked to cycle to get around and to work out. When I was living with my parents out in the suburbs, I used to bike around the neighborhood, going to the tennis court in the mornings or the stores in the weekend. In college, I cycled to campus and around the small town I lived in.

I didn't buy a foldable bike to keep up with a trend. I bought one because they're now cheaper and more widely available, unlike a few years ago when you couldn’t find them anywhere. And I also bought it because it takes up so little space; it's convenient to bring in the car, or to tuck away in a corner somewhere in my apartment.

But this particular person wasn't joking. A few weeks later she bought a foldable bike. I have yet to find out how often she has ridden it since.

While I'm happy with the recent enthusiasm for cycling, the fact that many people get a bike because it's a trend kind of worries me. What happens if the next fad for the middle class is to ride big, gas-guzzling motorbikes (supposing they become cheaper) or four-wheelers? Would they switch in a heartbeat, leaving their bicycles languishing with flat tires, rusting and collecting dust in their garages?

Why people are so preoccupied with having, wearing or using what other people have, wear or use escapes me. I’ve always assumed that with so many people in the world, making us little more than a tiny grain of sand in a huge desert, everyone would aspire to be different and would retain a semblance of uniqueness, instead of going with the pack.

Apparently not.

In a psychology book I recently read, the author says that human beings have two primary emotional needs. One deals with the sense of belonging and of being part of something bigger, and the other deals with having territory or space.

The author attributes this to millions of years of evolution, when our ancestors’

biggest concerns were physical survival – securing food, water and shelter – and procreation. Their long-term survivability depended on whether they belonged to the right pack (to shield themselves from predators in their everyday struggle to live), and whether they had adequate territory in which to hunt and mate.

You might not totally agree with this theory, but to me it makes sense. When it comes to following trends religiously, I think humans are driven by the need to belong. Hence the urge to update their wardrobe to keep up with others, and to adopt other people’s hobbies.

Still, I have an inherent and unhealthy prejudice against trends. Often this makes me seem like a stubborn anti-establishment type (though I assure you I am not).

I like batik and have bought it in various forms in the past, but when people started to make a big fashion statement out of it, it kind of turned me off. This happens a lot with fashion. I’d buy things like peasant skirts or baby-doll tops because I really like them, but the moment women’s magazines mark them as “must-have fashion items”, I retire them to the closet. If I haven’t given them away in five years' time, I might wear them again.

According to the rusty, brick-like and dated New Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus of the English Language (1991 Edition) on my bookshelf, a trend is “a tendency, general direction”; or “a dominant movement revealed by a statistical process”. Being trendy is “fashion following”.

Sometimes this pursuit to look fashionable just goes over my head. It still amazes me to see a group women sitting in a café, all wearing similar-looking puffy-sleeved batik blouses, with the same model BlackBerry phone in their hands, talking in the trendy and slangy pitch and inflection of the moment, using the slang words du jour that make me cringe for butchering the language.

And don’t get me started about leggings, those must-have items from a couple of years back that women wear under their shirts or short dresses. Unless they serve a special purpose, such as to hide the skin or to keep you warm, leggings are just wrong. They either accentuate your fat thighs or shrink your already small legs to look like chicken legs.

I haven't always been like this. In my younger years I went through the Gothic phase, then hippie, then grunge. But more than being trends, these were the styles I adopted because I could relate to them during that transient, impressionable time. I even saved some fashion items from this period as mementos: those bell-bottoms, the witch black dress and the iconic flannel shirt.

And realistically, unless you live a hermit's life, it’s rather hard to escape the trends. As I now spend less time worrying about looking original than looking reasonably good, I shop for what I call “utility clothing” (nothing to do with military fatigues). These are clothes that look good on you or make you look good, without seeming like you've made such a big effort. It's fashionably neutral. Call it the “Gap look”.

The makers of this kind of clothing must know their customers like to look good and dignified without drawing too much attention to their clothes. In that way, they can't have their customers looking out of date. So they make a few adjustments here and there: maybe tighten the sleeves one year, add or remove seams on the pants another year, or move the waistline a few inches down the hips, or feature the preferred color of the year.

So yes, I guess I’d be a hypocrite if I said I didn't update my closet at all – you won’t find a pair of high-waisted pants in mine.

But if it’s really true what they say about shoulder pads making a comeback, you won’t see me looking all puffy-shouldered anytime soon. I’d rather look three years behind the dedicated followers of fashion than look like Joan Collins in her heyday. 

+ Devi Asmarani

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