Who comes first, the customer or the seller

Who comes first, the customer or the seller?

The other day while I was walking through a department store I saw a bunch of small stores filled with clothes that typically older women would wear. I’m totally fine with clothes being marketed for older women, since they are, essentially the customers that are intended to buy the product. Yet, it seemed like the stores purposely sell unattractive and unfashionable clothes. I look at ensembles on mannequins and I sometimes wonder, “What was the designer thinking and who would want to buy that?!”

Remember that saying, “Which one came first, the chicken or the egg?” I’ve always been baffled by this question. Really which one came first? In order to have an egg you need to have a chicken, but without the egg you wouldn’t have had a chicken. Right? This riddle has always paused my train of thought when I find myself attempting to form an answer.

So my question is, was it the designers and fashion buyers that decided that this type of clothing is what older women are going to buy and wear or did the older women decide that they wanted to wear these type of styles forcing stores to sell that particular look? If you think about it, one side needs the other in order for anything to work, so who decides on which trends stays and leaves?

Unlike many situations, where the buyer decides what’s going to stay popular, it seems like with older women there fashion is decided for them. Many believe that they can no longer wear short dresses or that v-neck blouses are just unacceptable at their age. Whether I agree with this or not, it seems to me like the sellers are controlling the customers to think that they should dress a certain way. This is true in many other situations with younger generations, but as we all know, some things are in one day but the following day they are extinct.

So if there are those fashion trends that were sought out to be the must-have of the season, but unfortunately fail, causing changes in designs and looks, then why do I feel like each season for older women seems to be the same old same old in Japan? This is like one of those riddles that I can’t seem to grasp a solution to. Maybe it’s because older women want to buy these incredibly boring styles or it could be because older women choose to go with what the stores are selling which end up to be what designers think they want to wear. I really can’t tell who decides, because as I said before without the other it’s hard for one to exist. But whoever came first, I think they were totally wrong.