Fashion and science have a similar history

Fashion and science both emerge in Europe during the 1500s, both are activities driven by small elites who often need the support of the masses, while needing to maintain their independence from the masses, and both are guided primarily by a process of peer review, while lacking a strict definition of “peer”, and while acknowledging that eligibility for a peer role is constantly changing. Both fashion and science involve following a conversation that is happening is many nations at once, and both expect each participant to demonstrate, via their own efforts, that they have understood the conversation, and have an original contribution to make.

Given the shared history, it is interesting to realize how much issues of commensurability affect fashion. Wikipedia defines commensurability:

Commensurability is a concept, in philosophy of science, whereby scientific theories are commensurable if scientists can discuss them in terms permitting direct comparison of theories to determine which theory is truer. On the other hand, theories are incommensurable if they are embedded in starkly contrasting conceptual frameworks whose languages lack sufficiently overlapping meanings to permit scientists to directly compare the theories or to cite empirical evidence favoring one theory over the other. Discussed by Ludwik Fleck in the 1930s, and popularized by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, the problem of incommensurability results in scientists talking past each other, as it were, while comparison of theories is muddled by confusions about terms’ contexts and consequences.

So does the relative stagnation of fashion since the 1960s (people started wearing t-shirts and blue jeans back then, and we still wear them now) mean that this has been an era of unusual consensus?

Fernand Braudel pointed out that the Dutch first reached Japan in the early 1600s, and then returned 20 years later. The Japanese were stunned to see that Dutch fashion had changed dramatically in those 20 years — the Japanese were used to cultures where the fashions did not change for centuries on end. But then, and for a long time, part of Western culture was the constant evolution of fashion. These last 50 years have been an aberration.