Fashion and what lasts
Thought for the Day
7th November 2025
Good morning. I don’t normally take the slightest notice of fashion but my eye was caught earlier in the week by an article in which several women were all shown wearing striped rugby shirts. Apparently this is the new fashion. Then I saw another piece on fashion: how Michele Obama, like many women, got unfairly picked on for her clothes, particularly her bare arms. Finally there was David Beckham’s new suit, designed by his wife, which apparently the King admired.
Fashion gives a lot of people enjoyment and no doubt it all adds to the gaiety of the nations. But beyond clothes there is something much more fundamental-the fashion of our times, the intellectual, spiritual and moral outlook which shapes our age - what Germans call the Zeitgeist. This too, like all fashions, changes and the question is what is of lasting value and what will simply pass away as mistaken or trivial. How can we discriminate?
It is just as easy simply to be swept along by currents of thought as it is by changing fashions in suits, shoes or handbags. And as someone well put it ‘Whoever marries the spirit of this generation will find himself a widower in the next’.
T. S. Eliot, regarded as the quintessential modern poet for expressing the sense of meaninglessness and dislocation felt by so many in the 1920’s believed that we can only truly understand our own age if we are rooted in a tradition. Otherwise you simply get carried along unaware that you are being carried. If you stand within a tradition however you can see your age for what it is, what is truly new about it and what might be valuable. What Eliot said applies much more widely than to poetry. It is true of our whole stance on life. A religious, moral and cultural tradition gives you a standpoint from which you can judge your own times, a base from which to discriminate what is of lasting worth and what will simply disappear. There is a fine phrase in the Hebrew scriptures ‘Look to the rock from which you were cut and the quarry from which you were hewn.’ On that rock we can stand and build our lives. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus uses a similar powerful image. He says that if we build our house on sand the storms will sweep it away. But if we hear his words and act on them then as he put it is like someone building his house on a solid foundation. The storms will come, the river will burst against it, but it will stand. The house of our life will hold firm.