@dynamicduo Oh sure, I agree with what you are saying, and I didn’t mean for my question to sound like it was automatically relegating the examples you give in your 1st and 3rd paragraph to an “exception to the rule” category. I should have been more careful to explain that I was wondering about how the monotone/chrome thing seems to have become prevalent (but not exclusive) in many current Western and increasingly Westernized cultures.
Some examples: When I shop in a Walmart or Target clothing section I find myself confronted with almost all kahki, white, grey, black, and dimmed-down plaid. When I worked as a farmer, the clothes my friends and I wore were mostly of this color scheme, too. And now that I live in NYC and see stuff of high fashion every single day when I walk past the Pasons School for Design, I find that they often involve white, black, or neutral tones. I will admit, when I used to go for hippie garb in college I wore more colorful stuff, but I also wore a good deal of undyed fabric, especially hemp.
I do take issue with your comment about Goth style – when I used to wear Goth stuff in high school I did indeed wear mostly black, but it is hardly a difficult thing to see that the Goth style also enjoys stuff like neon pink and green. I might even speculate that it has mingled with emo clothing to some extent – go look in a Hot topic. I myself have some kelly-green Tripp pants I still wear sometimes.
And I did look into the history of kimonos and saris. What prompted me to go ahead and ask this question is that while there are social and religious reasons for more elaborate garb and certain colors of dye (like Tyrian purple), but the lower classes of many non-Western societies do also wear colorful stuff. So that is why it seems to be a “whole-cultural” trend, if you will. anthropologists in the house? Is there a term for what I’m trying to say here?
Could you be more specific on what exactly the difference is between “groups or cliques of fashion” and “culture”? I believe that these categories have significant overlap. In a related objection, I find a great deal of similarity between these situations: different towns in India have different ways to pleat saris, and Florida clothing is different from New York clothing.