Costume Echoes, Or Why Do Programmers Look Alike?
In chapter four of The Substance of Style, I write about "costume echoes."
Today's aesthetic imperative overturns the simplistic dichotomy between "rebellion" and "conformity," or "individual" and "mass": The result is selective conformity, an implicit or explicit drive for finer and finer gradations and the looks that identify them. Rather than choose between standing out and fitting in, we conform in some ways and diverge in others, choosing (consciously or unconsciously) a mix of meaning and pleasure, of group affiliation and individual taste. Friends develop what zoologist and author Desmond Morris calls "costume echo," adopting similar conventions of dress and carriage. Morris first identified the phenomenon when he "noticed two women walking down the street who dressed so similarly, they could have been in uniform."
Costume echoes apply to all sorts of surfaces, not just personal appearance. They can exist anywhere, including among organizations, and create new meanings through association. Consider all the late 1990s companies, particularly dot-com startups, that adopted logos with swooshes in them. "When in doubt, add one. Or two, or three," quipped a design consultant. The hopeful symbol of forward thinking even made it into the Gore-Lieberman campaign logo designed by Al Gore. Whatever its early adopters may have intended, the swoosh came to signify its era--not "the future" but "the late 1990s."
Along these lines, Justin Etheredge of CodeThinked explores the programmer dress code, part one and part two. (I had the same glasses as Dorothy Denning in the '70s. Same hairstyle, too.)
[Via Good Morning Silicon Valley.]