In a certain sense fashion gives woman a compensation for her lack of position in a class based on a calling or profession. The man who has become absorbed in a calling has entered a relatively uniform class, within which he resembles many others, and is thus often only an illustration of the conception of this class or calling. On the other hand, as though to compensate him for this absorption, he is invested with the full importance and the objective as well as social power of this class. To his individual importance is added that of his class, which often covers the defects and deficiencies of his purely personal character. The individuality of the class often supplements or replaces that of the member. This identical thing fashion accomplishes with other means. Fashion also supplements a person's lack of importance, his inability to individualize his existence purely by his own unaided efforts, by enabling him to join a set characterized and singled out in the public consciousness by fashion alone. Here also, to be sure, the personality as such is reduced to a general formula, yet this formula itself, from a social standpoint, posssesses an individual tinge, and thus makes up through the social way what is denied to the personality in a purely individual way.

DEFINE: Simmel reframes fashion not as mere adornment but as a social mechanism that grants significance to those lacking professional-class standing, parallel to how a calling lends importance to men.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 732