Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line lands like a doctor’s diagnosis delivered with a grin: fashion isn’t taste, it’s transmission. By calling fashions “induced epidemics,” he strips glamour down to mechanism. Epidemics don’t spread because each person independently reasons their way to a fever; they spread through contact, imitation, and a little panic. The word “induced” sharpens the accusation. This isn’t merely crowd psychology; it’s crowd psychology with an agent - advertisers, tastemakers, class anxieties, the soft coercion of wanting to belong.

The brilliance is how efficiently Shaw collapses the distance between the runway and the sickbed. He borrows the moral weight of public health - contagion, vulnerability, susceptibility - to make a cultural critique of consumerism and social conformity. Fashion becomes a polite form of mass compulsion: you don’t just choose the silhouette; you catch it. The subtext is pure Shaw: the modern self congratulates itself on individuality while eagerly outsourcing desire.

Context matters. Shaw wrote in an age when germ theory and epidemiology were remaking how people understood causation and control, and when industrial capitalism was professionalizing persuasion. Department stores, newspapers, and a rising middle class turned style into a repeatable cycle, not a slow drift. Shaw, the socialist dramatist who loved puncturing respectable pretenses, uses the language of science to puncture the romance of “personal preference.” His intent isn’t to sneer at clothes; it’s to expose how quickly “choice” becomes choreography when status is at stake.