On Sunday 26 January 2003 09:30 am, William Sjostrom wrote: > I had recently had a visitor, my wife's 19 year old nephew, who came from > the States to stay for a couple of weeks. Winter weather in the UK and > Ireland is always damp and cold, generally conducive to bad colds. His > dress was teenage fashion, at least where he comes from: a t-shirt and a > short sleeve shirt, unbuttoned. In a dry climate, this might be tolerable; > in a damp climate it is deadly. He adamantly refused to wear a sweater, > and came down with a chest infection.
Has there ever been shown a correlation between clothing styles and infection rates? I suppose cold could be an added stress, which could lower a person's immunity, but my guess is that the exhaustion of transatlantic travel would have been the greter stress. Add that to the introduction of a swarm of novel (to him) infectious agents, and a cold seems inevitable. > My puzzle is this. I am familiar with only two rational choice explanation > for fashions: information cascades and signaling. Information cascades may > explain why doctors use the same medicine, but I do not see how they > explain odd clothing fashions, from bell bottoms to platform shoes. > Signaling may explain weird clothes among teenagers, but I do not see how > it can explain costly attachment to fashion where there is no one to > signal. Habit and (mental) comfort. That is, he *likes* those clothes. -- Susan Hogarth http://www.tribeagles.org/
