Paper short abstract:

Social media’s focus on novelty has driven fashion design toward attention-grabbing “createmic” ideas, at the cost of “valuableness”—utility, craftsmanship, and emotional depth. This leads to designs lacking cultural/personal meaning. Anthropology offers ways to reclaim deeper creativity in fashion.

Paper long abstract:

The advent of social media and the “attention economy”, coupled with ever-increasing commercial pressures, has made salience, novelty and “dopamine activation” in fashion design paramount. Ideas and imagery that are both novel and counterintuitive—two of the three requisites of any creative idea that can jointly be termed “createmic”—are known experimentally to stimulate the brain’s reward system, and a selection process in social media is under way that elevates such striking and often surprising designs at the expense of designs that possess valuableness—the third of the three requisites of creativity. Valuableness in fashion design means designs that are effective, useful, adaptive, emotionally evocative, well-made, and trustworthy. This privileging of “createmity” at the expense of valuableness also minimises the kind of cultural drivers and authentic personal meanings that drove Coco Chanel and Alexander McQueen to produce their inventive and impactful designs. The relentless imperative to catch consumers’ attention is effectively leading to more “meaningless” clothing with merely metasemiotic significance—designs that primarily reference other designs rather than cueing deeper culturally embedded resonances and personal (i.e. the designer’s) experience. Anthropology, as the most broadly human of all the academic disciplines, is best placed to make sense of this development in human fashion as well as to point to ways of making fashion more personally and culturally meaningful. While createmity cannot realistically be abandoned, new routes must be found that magnify valuableness if fashion design is to attain a richer form of creativity.