'Fashion' against spirit of SE--too localised

Question

Proposal: Clothing and Fashion

One of SE's goals is to make the internet better. This means that posts on an SE site should be useful for a future audience. This is exactly why we have the 'close as too localised' option.

Now, Fashion is pretty localised. It changes by the week, day, minute, whatever. What's in vogue today will be useless in a few months.

So the Fashion part of this site should be (as @jadarnel27 humorously put it) closed as "too localised". In other words, extricate the "fashion" from the title and description.

What say?

Answer 1

It should be noted that some fashion changes rapidly. Some do not. Suits have been in fashion for many decades.

One could say that programming languages and software solutions change too. I'd bet that quite a few C++ questions over on SO have answers that are no longer the best choice given C++11. Programming idioms change; new ones are discovered, new language or library changes make old ones irrelevant. New versions of library X provide better ways of solving old problems all the time.

That's not to say that I necessarily support this site. But I don't think that this alone is good enough reason to stop it. Thus far, the tentative questions currently on the site don't seem to be of the kind that you fear. Most of them can change certainly, but they seem to be on the order of years later, not on the order of weeks or months.

I say let it go. If the site makes it to beta, then we'll see how it attracts real questions, given the questions used to define it.

Answer 2

Perhaps the people of the future will be glad to have an archive of the fashions of the past. Clothing historians would be. Of course, that's probably a wee way in the future... In terms of a future that's less far out, I still go through all my old fashion magazines looking for inspiration, or just for fun, and designers go through their archives and library collections. So information on fashion is still useful in the future in many ways.

Furthermore, the majority of questions about making and sewing apparel will be influenced by fashion - the way we sew things is influenced by the way we wear it.

However, perhaps fashion should not be used in the official wording - due to its ubiquitous nature it might even be considered redundant ;)

Answer 3

While I worry (especially based on some of the example questions) that this site won't go in this direction, the area of fashion has a LOT of factual, non-localized information that's fairly universally useful across the span of decades. In fact, a number of existing questions are things like "How can I do X," which is perfect for SE. I think in a beta, a lot of "suggestion" questions would be closed, voted down, etc.

To demonstrate some of the more useful information this site could provide, I proposed a few questions as kind of a counterpoint to this discussion question:

• What's the difference between a brogue and a wingtip? What does "brogued" mean?
• How can I hang my suit trousers so they won't fall off their hanger?
• How can I tell the difference between a fussed and a canvassed suit jacket? Is one higher quality than the other?
• Why is an unlined suit more expensive than a lined one?
• What's the lightest denim can be before it's considered chambray?

Answer 4

Just because programmers are not typically fashionista doesn't mean it's "too localised". That's just navel-gazing. If anything, it's EASILY as broad as the most general topics that StackExchange started about.