Ugly Sneakers and The Wisdom of Crowds
How ugly sneakers went from being a bad taste joke to being on the shelves of every fast-fashion retailer and why this matters to more than just fashion.
Is good taste universal? Is talent undeniable and will success always be granted to those most deserving as defined in a meritocracy?
In fall 2017, a new trend arose, one so ironically pedestrian, that those of us watching from the fashion sidelines joked at the thought of the trend becoming widespread.
But it did. Go to any fast-fashion chain today, and you will see at least one interpretation of the Balenciaga Triple S “ugly sneaker” aka the “dad shoe” on the shelves.
For most, this probably calls for no further investigation other than, “fashion will be fashion” and lets leave it at that.
But the utter ugliness, and the irony of some of some Balenciaga’s recent design hits (see $2000 blue Ikea tote, Edeka-inspired bag and Vetements’ DHL clothes), and those from similar designers (see Gosha Rubchinskiy’s resurgent gopnik-styled Adidas tracksuit) begs us to look at this example of consumer behaviour more closely.
What brings about the rise of these ultra ironic trends? Assuming its not simply because we have run out of new ideas? Why are they so popular?
The answer comes from a laboratory. Specifically, Matthew Salganik’s Music Lab at Princeton University.
Starting in 2006, the Music Lab sought to investigate how success and popularity are intertwined. They used songs from upcoming artists that research participants had previous not heard. What they found was that when teenagers became privy to the music tastes of their social world, a song rose to the top and stayed. That seems obvious enough.
However, what song became the top song, differed significantly between groups.
Therefore the preferences of their peers skewed their taste in music, resulting in surprisingly unpredictable outcomes. The researchers concluded that the only thing that was predictable, “was the how unpredictable the favourite song would be.”
But this was not the case in the control group, where teens were not informed about about the collective song rankings. In the control, one song was downloaded by more teens than any other song.
This is so surprising because if true talent was the only determinant of success, then the best song would always be the same between different groups. There would be a true winner, like in the control condition.
This reality lead to some pretty remarkable questions: Could a poor-preforming song become a crowd favourite if the music market was artificially manipulated? And more philosophically, could perceived success become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Experimenters tested this question by inverting the downloads chart. If the top song in the control condition had 128 downloads and the worst song had only 9, then in this new version of the study they reversed it: The previously top song was now shown with only 9 downloads and the previously worst song had 128 downloads. What did they find? The objectively bad songs, as determined independently in the control, rose up the charts and the objectively good songs plummeted towards the bottom.
That’s where this $500 Vetements DHL t-shirt comes in:
Like in 2017, when fashion followers saw the $995 Balenciaga dad sneakers for the first time, we thought: “r u 4 real?”
But after repeated conditioning i.e. seeing them on Instagram, online street style reviews, countless blogs and in real life on “influencers”, a lot of us had to give the sneakers a second take: “Did I miss something? Maybe on second thought they are not so bad after all…”
This is so surprising because it true talent was the only determinant of success, then the best song would always be the same between groups.
A self-fulfilling prophecy is thus at play in both the music market and the high fashion industry. Can a similar effect be at play in the general market? It begs the question: Are best-seller items popular because of their intrinsic quality or are they a victim of “irrational herding?”
Whereas these two aforementioned industries can very simply be brushed off as “you like X because everyone else does,” Harvard law professor and former White House administrator, Cass Sunstein, argues this behaviour plays out in a much bigger ballgame: how we choose which seller on Amazon, which comments we read first on online articles, who shows up on the electoral ballot and what a court jury decides.
In fact, as Sunstein writes, this research showcases how susceptible we are to overvaluing intrinsic merit. Whereas in reality, success is often highly serendipitous, people repeatedly forget or underplay this when attributing success. We underrate the extend to which success or failure depends on what happens after the launch of a new product/company/design and frequently overvalue the contribution of intrinsic merit. Moreover, a group’s final preference can be swayed by early support of a project, business, politician or cause, even when the choice would fail on its intrinsic merit.
When a product succeeds, we tend to assume that the success was inevitable (“of course everyone would sooner or later wear dad sneakers!”). As both Sunstein and professor network science, Albert-Laslzo Barabasi point out, we assume that the Mona Lisa was always destined for greatness. Same with Albert Einstein.
But “inevitability is often an illusion” as Sunstein contends. And the Mona Lisa only became famous in 1911 once it was stolen and not found until two years later. Before that, was just another painting in the Louvre (both examples are highlighted in Barabasi, 2018).
Many groups end up feeling, that it was inevitable that they would converge on their final preference. The research shows us however that the final preference is all too often determined by who spoke first in the group. This is easiest to apply to real life if we ask how meetings would go if bosses did not start talking first but rather the subordinates?
This phenomenon is called a Cascade Effect: where people withhold their own views or information out of respect for the shared information from others in the group. Our confidence in our decisions grows as we learn about other’s estimates because of the social proof that arise from the cascade. The result in is that group decisions do not come to reflect the aggregate of group information, which science has shown is more accurate than so-called experts. It matters because information cascades have been documented in a wide range of situations, including jury deliberations.
This has wider implications: how we choose what to buy on Amazon, which comments we read first online and who shows up on the electoral ballot
Trends come and go. It’s undeniable. Some trends are weirder than others, but over time many questionable trends become remarkably average. A positivity bias prevents us from remembering how we first thought about a trend. Thus the way to knockout trendiness has a lot less to do with intrinsic quality or suitability and more to do with the high levels of interest and attention the trend got in its infancy.
So if you see bougie separates on the street come Fall/Winter 2020 or Georgio Peviani jeans on influencers: buyers beware — the trends & items we come to love, are not always our own independent good taste and the in crowd isn’t so wise either.
