Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Fashion, Shaw needles, isn’t taste so much as transmission. Calling it an “induced epidemic” swaps the romantic language of self-expression for the clinical logic of contagion: you don’t “choose” the hemline or the hat; you catch it. The word “induced” sharpens the insult. Epidemics can be natural, but induced ones are engineered - pushed by tastemakers, advertisers, class anxiety, and the perennial fear of being seen as behind. Shaw’s jab lands because it reframes the fashionable crowd as patients congratulating themselves on their symptoms.

The subtext is pure Shavian skepticism about social consensus. If a look spreads, we treat its popularity as proof of its merit, when Shaw suggests the opposite: popularity is often evidence of manipulation plus herd instinct. Fashion becomes a tidy model for how ideas, morals, even political passions circulate - not through reasoned argument, but through imitation, status signaling, and dread of exclusion.

Context matters: Shaw lived through the rise of mass media, department stores, and modern advertising, when consumer desire began to be manufactured at scale. As a dramatist and critic of bourgeois pretension, he loved exposing the machinery beneath “refinement.” The metaphor also carries a moral sting typical of his work: epidemics are costly, irrational, and indiscriminate. By pairing them with fashion, he implies that society keeps volunteering for outbreaks, then mistaking conformity for culture.