Fashion and the statistical mode

What is the fashion for this season?

Do you know that this is related with the statistical mode?

Year after year there are famous catwalks about the new proposals for the clothing fashion world. Paris, Rome and New York are the leaders of the fashion trends in the world. So if you like to be a fashion follower you must follow the trends of those cities for each season of each year. But you know that fashion is a business and has to follow real trends. What are the things that the majority of the people in this world follow to dress? Well, that is the field of the statistical mode.

What color is the most used? Sometimes the grey, sometimes earth colors as orange and brown tones, sometimes brilliant colors as green, orange and yellow. Or maybe, sometimes the white could be the most used color in the world among other light colors. Each season, each designer has a different proposal. Although, according to statistics, the most used color in the occidental world is the blue… a long trend fashion coming from the 50’s film Rebel without a cause from James Dean. But the color also has its own history. In the past, for example during Roman times, clothing was whiter, together with creamy and beige colors because the tint was difficult to be produced and in consequence, colored cloth was very expensive.

Preferences for printings for clothing depend of each country. For a season, high couture designers will tell you if lines, geometrical or animal designs are the fashion of the season. Maybe flowers or colors mixing, or maybe marine or ethnical designs. But in statistical terms, the designs could be different for the real trends of world population. In rural communities, people like traditional clothing without printings and in the cities, it depends of people age. Occidental young people like t-shirts with artist or musician printings. Some older people choose lines, squares and combination of serious colors. So, what is the real fashion?

An interesting question in this point could be what is the most used clothing in the world? Well, in the occidental world, the answer is a little funny: interior clothing, socks and shoes! Maybe close followed by t-shirts, jeans and sport shoes.

The mode is a statistical measure of central tendency. The other two are the average and the median. In a data sample, for example the type of clothing for people, the average says which kind of clothing those people wear. In an occidental young people sample, it could be t-shirt and jeans. On the other hand, if we analyze the long of women skirts, the median will give us the large that is just in the half of that population, maybe just above the knee for typical occidental women. And the mode is the kind of clothing that appears most frequently in a population sample. For the occidental world, what is the kind of clothing that most people wear?

For sure, there are obvious differences between the catwalks and the common streets. Fashion and mode trends are not the same. However it is curious that sometimes, the designers like to take a walk among the common people to decide what to propose for the next season. What do you think?