Column: Were all dedicated fashion enthusiasts

But one item from this decade that I’m fond of is a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses.

I was first impressed with them when I saw Tom Cruise wearing a pair of the most expensive Ray-Ban Clubmaster sunglasses in the movie Rain Man. Mine were cheaper but had a certain resemblance to his.

I remember that trip to the movies very well. I was 17 and took this girl who I suspected was a little too fancy for me.

It was our first date and turned out to be our last. Every time I called her she was in the bath. I couldn’t understand why she seemed to need it so much.

But my attraction to Ray-Ban sunglasses turned into a long-term relationship. It’s been going particularly strong the last few months and I expect it to last.

Temperatures can drop and nights get longer, but there is still enough sunshine that sunglasses are needed. So I’m not leaving without them.

It quickly became clear that I was not the only one who was convinced by Tom Cruise’s sunglasses. They seemed to appear everywhere. At the same time, boxer shorts took over from Y-fronts. Anyone who watched TV at that time will remember the Levi 501 commercial with Nick Kamen.

He walks into a laundromat, takes off his T-shirt and Levis – to raise an outraged eyebrow and sneer – and sits there while they wash, wearing only his white boxers.

I always wondered what happened to his white t-shirt. If he was in the same load as his jeans, didn’t he have to turn blue? Others wondered where they could get a pair of boxers like hers. Sales of Levis and white boxers soared as a result. The impact was also not limited to men. Among the countless media reports on Kate Middleton was one claiming that she had a photo of Prince William on her wall during her teenage years. But a friend at the time denied it and said her only teenage poster was Nick Kamen.

It only takes a little exposure for fashions to quickly spread around the world.

Take the “Rachel” haircut. In the late 80’s and early 90’s I remember a lot of girls and women who used to do perms.

Then in an April 1995 episode of Friends, Jennifer Aniston’s character Rachel Green first appeared with long, straight locks. And 11 million British women have admitted to trying to copy her hairstyle.

Hair straighteners have become common and dangerous. I severely burned my fingers after taking one wondering what it was.

Could fashion trends have more significance? American economist George Taylor thought so.

In 1926, he proposed a theory called the “hem index”.

He suggested that the strength of an economy was reflected in the length of women’s dresses – and more specifically that the hems increased with stock prices.

In good times such as the shorter ‘roaring 20s’ skirts were in vogue. But after the Wall Street crash and the ensuing global depression, they lay down again, almost overnight.

Mini skirts were popular in the ‘Greed is Good’ years of the ’80s, but they became outdated after the stock market crash of 1987. Periods of economic growth are believed to lead to new ventures in other areas, such as entertainment and fashion. But when times get tough, everyone plays it safer.

There might be something in it, but it wouldn’t be the surest indicator of how to invest your life savings. We also see fashions in language, of course. Two of my personal linguistic hates are the phrases “fit for purpose” and “moving forward”. People hear them, think they sound smart or sophisticated, and copy them – and so they spread like wildfire. Trying to eradicate them would be as difficult as trying to put out the wildfires in West America.

We are all influenced by the fashion choices of others. It is inevitable and it is not necessarily a bad thing. Wear boxers if you’re more comfortable with them. Sunglasses are an eminently practical safety measure, especially if you are driving in this weather.

Their mildly hostile anonymity can make anyone cool, even my dad.