This is an interesting comment on market trends. In basic economics it is usually the rule that if you haven't got enough demand for your product you have to promote madly to drum up business. If word-of-mouth is flooding your capacity to deliver with orders, this becomes a less pressing concern. Large companies keep it up anyway, though, just to ensure future traffic.

This suggests that whenever men stopped wearing brilliant clothes -- oh, say, during the advent of Calvinism, for example.... it is either because they were in a supply side market, or the natural market dynamics were being interfered with. This could be because demand was artificially suppressed (product is made illegal, excessive cost of locating product, social censure, etc.) OR because the capacity to supply product was interfered with (for example, shortage of parts or raw material, unreasonable cost of export, or the manipulation into belief in limiting supply for some arbitrary political reason). Consider the Middle Agers, for example, when initiative on the part of the ordinary man was discouraged because the benefit of the innovation would never be experienced by the innovator under feudal control.

I think it would be reasonable in Anglo Saxon circles to say that the post-Elizabethan dark-spirited conservatism actually damaged the flow of natural economic transactions and reduced the use of "advertising" in males by:

(a)persuading them they should not serve more than one customer
(b)persuading them that evcen thinking about economies of scale was criminal and
(c) establishing a conspiracy among potential customers against accepting reduced prices, improved packaging, special offers, rebates and other incentives to a naturally prosperous economy.

The ultimate extension of this trend can be found in the suburbs around New York in the Fifties, where all the fathers went to work in gray, dull flannel suits wearing precisely matched dull colored fedoras, averaged 2.25 children, Doris Day reigned on AM Radio, and the men were constrained by extreme censure if they tried normal promotional techniques. Sigh. And they thought Reagonomics was bad!!!

A