A thought struck me the other day, or rather a question I thought it might be worth asking here to see what consensus there might be.
That question is... 'Are the near-synchronous early adopters of a brand new fashion trend the most readily identifiable neurotypical people in society?'
Actually, that's not quite the question, Finessing it a little further... is a swift and sudden sea change in fashion, in its earliest days, the closest thing we have to a dependably 'there they are!' moment in time (fleeting as it is) of being able to spot the neurotypical majority in, for want of a better word, a uniform that leaves no doubt.
Now, I'm not talking about the eventual saturation of one fashion type trickling through a society and to some extent dictating how all sorts of people , NT and ND alike, may be dressed just cos that's what's been on the shelves for six months, a year, three years etc.
I mean the initial big bang moment where it feels like a big sea change just popped up near-universally mere days or weeks before you notice. One such instance phenomenon has just materialsed very recently in my city here in Northern Ireland (I'm reliably informed we're about half a year behind 'cooler' cities from just over the water, so their equivalent explosion happened first) where oversized jeans (reminiscent of the early 90s but with some kind of pseaudo-flares twist) just seemed to appear on many people practically overnight. First half of January... nowehere to be seen... last fortnight of January... EVERYWHERE!
So let's hypothesise that there's a window of about three months or something where a neutotypical 'that's what we must wear now' reflex kicks in and they avail of their earliest opportunity to ditch the old wardrobe for the new. Maybe past that specific window of time, less and less caertainty creeps in about the likely neural wiring of the people wearing that fashion, but in that exact slice of the continuum, is it fair to say that one has a way better chance than usual of identifying a neurotypical person as such by sight, in about three seconds, just walking/driving past them?
I'm not saying it to be derrogatory or be as reductive as to call them 'sheep' or whatever. I just suspect that in these briefest of sanapshots we probably have in all those early adopters the most comfortable with change, societally normative, continuity-flexible, tolerant of new materials/textures, contendedly in-flux with their basic silhouette etc. people that occupy the planet... and suddenly they are foregrounded as readily identifiable in a way that mid-fashion-cycle moments will laatterly obfiscate and bury.
I also appreciate that there will be some autistic people whose special interest just happens to be fashion (maybe to the extent that they excitedly try everything out asap), so I know that there isn't total universality in how the phenomenon can be read. But I suspect that more esoteric interests are more, er, typical of us autistics, and that even where fashion is someone's passion they may still have sensory issues and whatnot that make them admire from afar while still sticking with a signature look/feel that gives them thee stable continuity we most often need.
Anyway, like everything I try to say simply this has instead become a sprawling forest of words, but hopefully you get the gist of what I'm saying/asking. A convincing conjecture or just woolly thinking? Discuss... or don't [as prefered :-)]
