another reason women shop for clothes more often than men ...

Some years ago a very good friend (female) offered the opinion that a reason for more frequent shopping for clothes by women was that "their shape changes more often."

I don't recall taking her comment seriously at the time, and would hesitate to suggest that it means much now; but I can see some plausibility that there might be an influence(?)

The emphasis on juvenile and adolescent "fashions" is quite obviously a result of "money following the market." Growing persons do need regular replacements of clothing to maintain proper fit; and it appears that the constant rotation of fads and fetishes is a deliberate attempt to prevent "hand me down" passage of juvenile clothing to the next generation, in an effort to make sure that each new size, for each person, is a new purchase.

As Shimrod suggests, the marketing shitheads [chose your own noun] and buyers seem to control what's available. In the early 1960s, the Harvard Business Review offered several articles debating the "threshold market share" that a product must reach to "be a required offering by all major retailers." Only a bit later, the emphasis changed to the "threshold market share" that a product must reach to "drive all competing products out of the marketplace." By the mid to late 1960s, it was assumed that at least in the "mass retail markets" a 15% share of the market for an individual product probably was sufficient to eliminate effective competition.

The original Zip-Loc baggie reached 12% "market penetration" before it became literally impossible to buy a bag without a "zipper" on it. (A recent count at my local grocers found 38 different "brands" of 1-quart bags and 19 1-gallon bags, all with "zippers" and NONE of any size without. Since the zipper is not the best thing for all uses I sometimes buy the ziplocs and cut the zipper off for some uses, since all other kinds have disappeared. This isn't a totally satisfactory solution, since to support the "zipper" the bag has to be 3 times as thick as is optimum for freezer storage; but it's the best available.

Shoes for male wearers are another striking example of the disappearance of choice. They all look alike. They all weigh in at 4.9 pounds (or more) per pair. They're all ugly and hurt my feet. The situation is likely just as bad for women's shoes, but the more common complaint I hear is that they don't stock sizes large enough for most of my adult female friends (so they only intend to sell to children?).

John