Virginia Postrel’s The Marginal Appeal of Aesthetics: Why Buy What You Don’t Need? suggests that maybe our desires for impractical decoration and meaningless fashion don’t come from Madison Avenue after all:
When Debbie Rodriguez went to Kabul with a group of doctors,nurses, dentists and social workers, the Michigan hairdresser intended to serve as an all-purpose assistant to the relief mission’s professionals. Instead, she found her own services every bit as popular as the serious business of health and welfare. “When word got out that there was a hairdresser in the country, it just got crazy,” she told The New York Times. “I was doing haircuts every 15 minutes.”Liberation is supposed to be about grave matters: elections, education, a free press. But Afghans acted as though superficial things were just as important. A political commentator noted, “The right to shave may be found in no international treaty or covenant, but it has, in Afghanistan, become one of the first freedoms to which claim is being laid.”