The Earth at the Center of Fashion

After brunch in SoHo, my friend and I stopped by The Earth Room and The Broken Kilometer, two holdovers from the era when SoHo’s center of gravity was art. Today, the gravitational pull is fashion, so we wandered into a boutique.

People often avoid genuine self‑expression because it makes them feel vulnerable. We like to believe fashion is an exception since we’re forced to pick something to put on our bodies. But what we project through clothing is rarely our interiority. More often, it’s our position on a social timeline.

The technology world uses the innovation adoption curve, that bell‑shaped distribution divided into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Trends begin at the left edge and drift to the right. Fashion follows the same logic. Most people aren’t trying to express individuality; they’re trying not to fall behind. They don’t aspire to be innovators or early adopters, but they definitely don’t want to be seen as late majority or, worse, laggards.

That’s why fashion brands exist. Buy something from a new line, and the store has already done the classification work for you. You’re automatically early majority without knowing anything about fashion. The high prices function like premiums for anxiety insurance: pay enough and you won’t embarrass yourself. Ironically, it’s not self‑expression but self-suppression.

Then there are the people who simply ignore the curve. Nerds, for instance, are pure pragmatists who care only about comfort; once they find the outfit that feels right, they never deviate. Others have found an internal voice, the way mature writers do. You can see it in the way their choices cohere without effort; that’s when we say someone has a “style.” Both groups are steady, but for different reasons: the former out of indifference, the latter because they have found who they are.

They’re like The Earth Room, unchanging while everything around them rises and falls in waves.