I agree with everything except your first paragraph. I've never had trouble finding perfectly normal clothing that allows me to sidestep fashion and merely look good. Neither have I noticed any particular social opprobrium for doing so, though I'm hardly at a maximal status (and my social circle is likely atypical), so who knows.

My impression is that it's always been possible (for men at least) to take the low-risk option and dress "conservatively".

It seems to me that groups who can signal within-group status unambiguously will tend to downplay fashion.
Examples. Tech/Science smart people don't bother much with it, as it's not possible to fake it in their world, while humanities 'intellectuals' have to play a role, as their intelligence can't be casually observed by outsiders. Ditto for Athletes, or really anyone who gains substantial status from visible muscles or visible grace.
I would expect this to also be the case for people who engage in any sort of formal contests, e.g. poker players.

All good points, although I'd like to throw in a couple of my own. We see that fashion is very important almost universally in Western society among teenagers and, to a slightly lesser extent, young adults. This is a group of people who do not yet have enough skill or knowledge to successfully signal their status in the same ways that adults do: although there is stratification in skills and knowledge, it's relatively small to the wide variation that will appear in adulthood (mostly due to people pushing their skills and knowledge to have higher value, thus shifting the mean, rather than a general dispersion where an equal number of people get less skilled and knowledgeable as get more skilled and knowledgeable). But fashion is something that is well within the reach of teenagers and young adults to use for more stratified status signaling. The story then plays out as described in the post.

At this point in my life, I find fashion to not be very important except in one regard: signaling class. I work at a university providing instructional support to faculty by running and maintaining some computer assets (vague enough for you). Around campus, clothing is used to signal a persons class within the university: student, grad student, staff, professional staff, administrators, and faculty. The clothing choices are roughly as follows:

• Student: the sort of fashion worn by young adults described above.
• Grad Student: a combination of student fashion and faculty fashion, usually of cheaper quality than what either undergraduate students or faculty wear.
• Staff: a uniform (if given one, such as custodians and grounds workers) or a mix of casual and business casual clothing.
• Professional Staff: business clothing, but generally not suits.
• Administrators: suits
• Faculty: whatever they find comfortable, since faculty signal their class by virtue of age and by not looking too much like administrators or professional staff (usually accomplished by keeping a somewhat unkempt appearance).

Aside from the undergraduate students, no one really uses fashion beyond this for signaling purposes, or at least if they try to such attempts appear to be ignored. Instead other status signals are important: skills, knowledge, job performance, credentials, etc.. Just don't wear the wrong class of clothes, or else you'll be ridiculed by your class peers and confused for the wrong class by strangers (which is sometimes what people try to do by dressing up from their class, but this is usually regarded as bad behavior by class peers as being overdressed).

What you all seem to be missing is that on a T-shirt, "Real Men Wear Pink" is a pun. In this context, Pink is not a color, it's a brand name: http://www.thomaspink.com/

the people too poor to immediately replace all their clothes are wearing any other color.

This one hits close to home.

During my middle school years I was going to a private school with wealthy children. It was all my parents could to to afford regular clothes, however I wanted to keep up. So I saved my money and waited months to go buy the hippest shirt around. So I stroll into a dance that we were having with my (no joke) purple superman t-shirt and quickly get rebuked and laughed at. Needless to say, I was behind the curve on that one - and it never saw the light of day again.

False signal failed.

The art theory is interesting, but incomplete. It seems that once photography was invented, the art world needed to move towards art that was generally not highly visually appealing, because verisimilitude was too cheap. Note that art having mass appeal is often taken as a bad thing. If everyone likes a piece of art, owning it says nothing about you. If no one likes a piece of art, and you pay a lot for it, that does signal something about you. Basically, the upper class and the artistic cognoscenti had to aim for something that did not have obvious appeal and that made it easy to regulate the entry of new artists, and modern/post-modern art accomplishes that perfectly.

A similar phenomenon likely occurs with wine. There are many drinks that taste better, but what's the point of drinking root beer if everyone likes root beer? Wine has high variance in flavor and does not taste good enough for people to like it without putting in serious effort. It's the perfect status-signaling drink.

Black leather jacket, black t-shirt, black jeans, cowboy boots, and a zippo pouch: some outfits never go out of style. I'm going to be wearing this until the day the cops put a bullet in my head.

Stereotypically feminine colors (e.g. pink and purple) for shirts and ties were popular among London's businessmen in 2002. Not long after that, lager louts and Essex wide boys took a shine to pink polo shirts -- typically worn with the collar popped. Eventually chavs, spides, neds, and scally lads began to collect pink shirts sold in market stalls.

Young men in New Jersey and other guido (AKA gino) habitats were seen wearing pink polo shirts in 2004. The fashion eventually trickled down to garden-variety North American dudebros.

REAL MEN WEAR PINK

And here I thought that was a Dragonball Z reference.

I want simple, good-looking apparel that covers my nakedness and maybe even makes me look attractive. The clothing industry believes someone my age wants either clothing laced with profanity, clothing that objectifies women, clothing that glorifies alcohol or drug use, or clothing that makes them look like a gangster.

I wear cargo pants because they have lots of pockets, and t-shirts with robots on them because it gets me into conversations about robots. I don't have any problem finding either of these things. I'm pretty sure it makes me look like a geeky person with no particular concern for fashion, which is, if anything, what I want to signal anyway.

Are you saying that rich white kids adopted ghetto fashion before poor white kids did? Doesn't ring very true to me.

I agree but I think that there are some other forces at play in fashion too.

Fashion sure involves an element of exaggerating desirable body traits with clothing. High-heel shoes that make the wearer appear taller, jackets that extend and exaggerate the shoulders, and dresses that enlarge and exaggerate the waist and breasts are some examples.

I suspect that there is also an element of intentionally identifying as part of a group by wearing similar clothing, regardless of whether that group is high-status or not.

Any others?

This discussion makes me glad to see the proliferation of mandatory uniform rules in public schools in the US.

the middle class is terrified of wearing lower class clothes, but the rich are so obviously not lower class that they can get away with it

This is called "countersignaling."

| rich people have to buy sculptures made of human dung just to keep up.

This explanation of modern art seems incomplete. For many artists now, bleeding edge art is an exercise in "conceptual" problem solving and game-playing. (For discussion see, e.g., Kosuth 1969.) The economic forces described by Bell/Pinker do put selection pressure on which art gets distributed, displayed and, to a small extent, produced. But to describe these pressures without some reference to the noble and useful productions behind them seems to imply the common error of dismissing modern art as a bluff, a bullshit or some other mostly-useless activity.