The Cerulean Sweater
I watched Devil Wears Prada last week. One of the scenes that caught my eye was the one where Miranda Priestly, the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine catches Andrea Sachs played by Anne Hathaway chuckling at a pair of blue belts that looked similar but weren’t quite similar.
Priestly, in her gentle yet intimidating voice, asks Andrea if there’s something funny about what they were doing.
Andrea replies, “No no… it’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me.”
Priestly, the kingpin of global fashion, delivers a fantastic monologue where she humbles Andrea (and the viewers) about what it takes to pioneer cultural movements through fashion.
Andrea, in this scene, is wearing a Cerulean blue sweater that’s rather minimal. And it re-affirms her identity as somebody who doesn’t have much to do with the world of fashion.
Priestly calls it the lumpy blue sweater and then goes on to teach her about the “supply chain of culture.”
Andrea’s rejection of fashion was itself pre-packaged by fashion itself. Miranda showed her that opting out of it was simply impossible because of how fashion spreads.
And it’s not just about clothes, it’s about anything that’s part of our culture. Culture fossilises into products we use everyday.
Here’s the supply chain of culture:
Experimentation & risk-taking → symbolic adoption → mass imitation → commodification → saturation → rejection → RESTART.
This is the pendulum, this is how the culture moves.
The reason it starts with million-dollar artists, luxury houses, avant-garde designers, musicians, aristocrats, or subcultures is because they operate at the edge of risk. They have social permission to look absurd before the rest of society catches up. This is where a standard Bangalore engineering graduate might believe that fashion runways are weird and they wear weird clothes. The level of risk and experimentation they operate at is far beyond the appetite of the commoner.
People eventually inherit the stabilised versions of the original work. The work that has now become socially acceptable and “safe”
Take oversized silhouettes.
In the 1980s and 90s, oversized tailoring existed in high fashion, hip-hop, skate culture, Japanese avant-garde design. It signalled rebellion, anti-corporate posture, looseness, dominance, youth culture. Years later, Zara sells oversized shirts to engineering students who think they’re just buying “comfortable fits.”
You can trace nearly every mainstream aesthetic this way.
Streetwear itself is a perfect example. What started as surf/skate counterculture in California became hip-hop luxury signaling, then became runway fashion through people like Virgil Abloh, then became global mass retail. Now a teenager in Bangalore wears “minimal oversized streetwear” bought from Instagram brands without knowing its lineage includes skate crews, rap scenes, and luxury fashion houses.
Culture moves downstream because humans imitate status. Not wealth necessarily, but status. When a new niche aesthetic appears, “who’s wearing it?” matters more than “does it look good?”
That’s why musicians and artists matter disproportionately. They are aesthetic venture capitalists. They absorb reputational risk first.
Then tastemakers like editors, photographers, influencers, fashion houses, celebrities translate that signal. Then corporations industrialize it.Then middle-class consumers normalize it.Then lower-cost manufacturing mass-produces it.Then the original creators abandon it because the signal lost exclusivity.
The same exact mechanism exists outside clothing too.
Language: academic jargon → Twitter intellectuals → startup founders → LinkedIn posts → everyday slang.
Food: peasant food → chef reinterpretation → premium dining → mass fast-casual chains.
The cerulean sweater Andrea wore that day didn’t start with her. It started with an avant-garde designer, a subculture, a moment of risk. By the time it reached her, it had shed its history and become simply a color, simply a sweater, simply something to wear.
That’s just how culture travels. It moves downstream, loses its origins, and becomes the water everyone drinks. Most of us live at the bottom of that river. And the water is fine.