著者

中島 純一

出版者

東海大学出版会

雑誌

東海大学紀要 文学部 (ISSN:05636760)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.73, pp.84-69, 2000

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In sociological studies, fashion phenomena are classified into the head of collective behavior in the wide sense of the word. This paper examines how the contagion and the imitation theories, which form the backbone of modern fashion studies, find their places in the field of collective behavior studies. This paper also demonstrates how the genealogy of fashion theories has been formed, by focusing on the three leading scholars in this field : Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde and George Simmel. Le Bon, the father of the notion of "crowd psychology, " applied the medical notion of "contagion" to sociological studies. His theories of "the masses " and "contagion" have long been authoritative in the succeeding researches in fashion. Tarde brought forward the notion of "the public" and the theory of "imitation." His imitation theory differs from Le Bon's in his assumption that "the imitation principle" continues to alter societies. In the center of his fashion studies lies another theory of "the trickle down effect, " which is still widely quoted in the researches concerned. Simmel developed the theories of Le Bon and Tarde into his "ambivalent structure in psychology" theory, the characteristic of which is the reciprocal elements of conformity and nonconformity.