Ideas Are Fashions

conceptual-metaphor Social Behavior → Intellectual Inquiry

Categories: cognitive-science linguistics philosophy

What It Brings

Ideas come into style and go out of style. They are adopted because everyone else is adopting them, and abandoned when they become passe. This metaphor maps the dynamics of fashion — trend, imitation, obsolescence, revival — onto intellectual life, making the history of ideas look like a succession of styles rather than a progressive accumulation of knowledge. Lakoff and Johnson introduce it in Chapter 10 of Metaphors We Live By as part of the ideas cluster.

Key structural parallels:

Style and currency — “That idea is very much in vogue.” “Marxism is back in fashion.” “Behaviorism went out of style.” The metaphor gives ideas a temporal profile defined not by truth or usefulness but by social adoption. An idea is current the way a hemline is current: because enough people are using it right now.
Trendsetters and followers — “She’s always at the cutting edge.” “He’s an intellectual trendsetter.” “They’re just following the latest fad.” The metaphor creates a social hierarchy of intellectual adoption: some people set trends, most follow them, and the laggards are stuck with yesterday’s ideas the way some people are stuck with yesterday’s clothes.
Obsolescence without refutation — “That approach is dated.” “His methods are old-fashioned.” Ideas don’t need to be disproven to be abandoned; they just need to look old. The fashion metaphor provides a mechanism for intellectual change that has nothing to do with evidence or argument — ideas are replaced because they feel stale, not because they are wrong.
Revival and retro — “There’s been a revival of interest in virtue ethics.” “Structuralism is making a comeback.” Just as fashion cycles bring back old styles, the metaphor accommodates intellectual revivals without requiring new evidence. Something can be intellectually compelling again simply because enough time has passed.
The avant-garde — “That’s a very avant-garde position.” “She’s ahead of her time.” The metaphor imports the fashion industry’s temporal logic: the most interesting ideas are the ones that have not yet been widely adopted, and being early is a mark of sophistication.

Where It Breaks

Fashion is arbitrary; ideas are not (entirely) — the fashion metaphor implies that intellectual change is driven by taste, boredom, and social dynamics rather than by evidence, argument, or discovery. While there is real truth in the sociology-of-knowledge critique (ideas do gain and lose currency for social reasons), the metaphor overstates the case. Some ideas go out of fashion because they are wrong.
The metaphor conflates novelty with quality — in fashion, the new replaces the old because it is new. The metaphor imports this logic into intellectual life, making it hard to distinguish genuine innovation from mere novelty-seeking. “Cutting-edge” research is not necessarily good research; it is just recent.
Fashion has no cumulation — this season’s style does not build on last season’s in the way that scientific knowledge (sometimes) builds on prior work. The fashion metaphor cannot represent intellectual progress — only intellectual succession. If ideas are fashions, then there is no sense in which we know more than we used to.
The metaphor is self-undermining in academia — calling an idea “fashionable” is always slightly pejorative in intellectual contexts. The metaphor is used almost exclusively as a criticism: to say an idea is fashionable is to say it is adopted for the wrong reasons. This gives the metaphor a built-in rhetorical bias that limits its analytical usefulness.
Group adoption is not the same as group imitation — fashion spreads through imitation and social pressure. But ideas also spread because they solve problems, explain phenomena, or provide useful tools. The metaphor erases the functional reasons for intellectual adoption by treating all uptake as following a trend.

Expressions

“That idea went out of style years ago” — intellectual abandonment as fashion obsolescence
“Marxism is back in fashion” — intellectual revival as style revival
“He’s always at the cutting edge” — intellectual innovation as fashion leadership
“That approach is very much in vogue” — current intellectual currency as fashionability
“His methods are old-fashioned” — outdated approaches as last season’s clothes
“It’s just the latest intellectual fad” — dismissing an idea as a passing trend
“She’s ahead of her time” — early adoption as avant-garde positioning
“There’s been a revival of interest in virtue ethics” — intellectual return as fashion comeback
“That’s a dated analysis” — intellectual work marked by its era like a period costume
“Structuralism is making a comeback” — the cyclical return of intellectual frameworks

Origin Story

Lakoff and Johnson list IDEAS ARE FASHIONS in Chapter 10 of Metaphors We Live By as one of a dozen source frames for ideas. The entry is brief — “That idea went out of style years ago” is the single example they provide — but the mapping is structurally rich because it imports the entire social dynamics of fashion adoption: trendsetters, followers, cycles, revivals, and obsolescence.

The metaphor has particular force in the humanities and social sciences, where intellectual change often does look more like fashion succession than like scientific progress. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) can be read as an extended meditation on the degree to which paradigm shifts resemble fashion shifts rather than rational convergence on truth.

References

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Chapter 10
Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Ideas Are Fashions”
Kuhn, T. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) — on the social dynamics of intellectual change
Bloor, D. Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976) — the Strong Programme in the sociology of knowledge, which takes the fashion analogy seriously