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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Your argument could be read as beauty not mattering. For a different POV, countless animals will risk their life to look fabulous/make themselves stand from the pack to leave a legacy.

Arguably fashion could be one of the most important thing to people.

PS: on a side note, even in technical circles where we could expect more detachment from appearances in general, a lot of comment will revolve around "X looks dumb". As in "I'd look dumb taking a photo with an iPad" or "who would wear VR googles around people and look like an idiot". People are social animals, and they care about how they look.

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However, we should use our intelligence to find ways to curb the extent to which clothing has become an obsession, becaue the clothing industry is unsustainable and creates enormous amounts of waste and pollution. With our big brains, surely we can find ways to differetiate and display our styles without so much waste? Or perhaps we should just go back to trying to make AI think like us...

Picking clothes that make us look good, and frequently replacing our clothes, are really two quite different things. You don’t have to do the latter to achieve the former.

You could say that being green, or appearing to be, is in fashion.

As the same pattern arises in every domain, I don't see it as an issue with clothing in particular. We have depleted environmental resources and polluted with no bound in every field that didn't have extreme regulation.

I don't think we're obsessed over almonds and yet their production is wastingso much water in critical regions.

Right now it's cheaper to buy a new trouser than to have it repair by a local craftsman, and the fashion trends you are observing are also engineered and managed at an industry level, down to the color they'll want to push the next year.

TBH he answer could simply be regulation and bake the externalities in the price of the clothes. Some people will still change wardrobe every 3 months, but most won't have that luxury, and our views will adapt to that new reality.

i like this argument- fashion is left over animal spirits. the less rational (and more animalistic) we are, the more that fashion matters to us.

that would explain the drop in extreme fashion's popularity also as people become educated.

> the less rational (and more animalistic) we are, the more that fashion matters to us

Rational and animalistic are usually synonymous. Humans, on the other hand, tend to be far less rational.

Thus, the more rational we are, the more fashion matters to us. Or vice versa.

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