Fashion killed off dandyism

"Fashion is a collective imitation of regular novelty, even when it uses the alibi of expressing individuality, or as we might now say, 'personality'. It is essentially a mass phenomenon that has attracted the interest of sociologists, who see it as a good example of pure dialectic between the individual and the community. Moreover, Fashion has entered the mainstream, as evidenced in the remarkable boom in specialized women's magazines. Fashion is an institution, and nobody today still believes that it distinguishes. Now only unfashionable is distinctive. In other words, from the mass point of view, Fashion is perceived only by its opposite: if Fashion is health and morality, unfashionable is merely sickness and perversion.
We have witnessed a paradox. Fashion killed off all conceived originality in clothing by tyrannically taking over its institutional originality."

- Roland Barthes, Dandyism and Fashion
(The New Man, ArtEZ Press, 2010)