Social Conformity and Fashion Trends

Conformity Essay
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People’s choices and judgments, including their preference for specific fashion trends, are influenced by other’s people preferences and choices. People tend to embrace specific fashion trends when they establish that a significant share of a group they identify with also behaves that way. Self-categorization theory is a social psychology model that can be applied to rationalize why men and women conform to the pressure of fashion trends. The self-categorization model asserts that an individual’s sense of self is associated with mainstream practices that they associate with. In this context, an individual is likely to conform to fashion dictates to enhance their idea of group-based identity. Self-categorization model holds that individuals will likely adopt the attributes or fashion trends embraced by the most noticeable social in-groups, culminating in group-based conformity to norms (Pryor et al., 2019).
According to Reimer et al. (2020), social identity significantly influences social and individual phenomena, including social change and collective action. Although an individual can be a member of a specific group, others may not perceive them as such. This may influence the individual to change their behaviors or sense of fashion in order to identify with the popular fashion trends and thus achieve acceptability in social settings (Reimer et al., 2020). When an individual intensely perceives themselves as a member of an in-group culture that embraces specific fashion preferences, they will experience a heightened need to conform to such norms. A person will conform to the fashion trend when their membership value within the specific peer group increases by having similar attributes to others of the ascribed social group (Pryor et al., 2019). Self-categorization theory best explains the need to conform to fashion trends because a person seeks to conform to the specific behavior endorsed or popular among groups they authentically identify with.