FASHION. - From the Latin modus (form, manner, measure), it differs from usage, custom, costume, because it changes almost daily, it constitutes the model to be chased after, in such a way that fashionable things are done because others do them.
Fashion accompanies, one might say, all the manifestations of human activity: artistic and craft forms, literary activities, even public opinion obeys fashion, just as do the styles of dress and ornament, although these, especially today, mark more rapid changes.
It is to their variations, therefore, that the term fashion is more particularly applied, and with it are joined those accessories that complete it: jewels, fabrics more or less rich and costly, furs, furnishings of the house, products of the minor arts (wrought iron, crystal ware, lamps, carriages) — in short, whatever constitutes luxury (v.), which is a first-rate element in the development of fashion. This in turn is linked to the well-being of the various social classes and to the changes that new discoveries introduce into common life (such as motoring, metallurgy, mechanics, etc.). Fashion can harm Christian principles more or less gravely, both through the reckless squandering of goods (when it is not proportionate to one's own condition, or causes one to neglect more important needs of body or soul, or becomes fanaticism or tyranny, mortifying higher ideals) that sounds like an insult to public misery, and through the baneful influence that with its audacities it can exercise on public morals (when it oversteps the limits of modesty, or takes on the aspect and purpose of an art that lures to vice, or tends, consciously or even out of frivolity, to disturb and overturn the instincts). Already in Christian antiquity, ecclesiastical writers often rise up harshly and crudely against the fatuities of fashion, to which the new converts, especially women, did not know how to submit. To limit the excesses of fashion and luxury, sumptuary laws were already being attempted at the end of the Middle Ages. Dante bitterly brands the shamelessness of the Florentine women of his age (Purg., XXIII, 94-108), and in the 18th century in Rome measures had to be taken to repress the excess of women's necklines flaunted even in church. St. Antoninus of Florence (cf. Summa moralis, Verona 1740, p. 236 ff.; Confessionale in vulgari, s. l. 1483, ff. 9-10), St. Bernardino of Siena (cf. Due prediche sulla vanità delle donne e sulla viduità, ed. L. Marri Martini, in La Diana, 1-2 [1930], p. 1 ff.; P. Bargellini, S. Bernardino da Siena, Brescia 1942, pp. 15-24), and Savonarola (cf. Pastor, III, pp. 84 ff., 166 ff. and passim) attempted to put a curb on the immoralities of fashion with the famous burnings of vanities. No wonder, then, if even afterward the Church, through the voice of her ministers, found herself constrained to resort to the means in her power, to repress the excesses of a paganizing custom that finds in fashion an accomplice difficult to vanquish (cf. among other things the decree of the S. Congregation of the Council, 12 Jan. 1930).