There used to be a time when the world’s different cultures were separated by vast distances. This distance created pockets, preventing far flung cultures from influencing each other. There was cultural exchange, adoption and adaptation throughout the world, but they were mostly through neighboring cultures. The result was a cultural diversity that is lost today. One area where this is apparent is clothing. Everybody seems to be dressing mostly the same, with some variation to be sure, but around the same jeans and t-shirt combo with maybe a shirt or a polo.
These days, the overwhelming influence is american, but there have been significant contributions from the European powers in the past. Owing to this influence, many countries have mostly stopped wearing their traditional outfits in day to day life. Some peoples, we can think of the populations of eastern Asian countries like China and Japan or the natives of North America and Australia, have mostly stopped wearing their traditional garbs except on formal occasions, and even then they sometimes revert to western clothes. In the case of Africa, we have a bit of everything. Factors like a country’s level of integration in the international order, wealth, stability and colonial past all seem to influence its degree of adoption of western clothing.
This adoption can be seen as a manifestation of an old phenomenon called westernization. That is the process of assimiliation of western cultural practices, of which clothing is but one face. Westernization even used to be an explicit part of the policies of countries like Japan and China who sought to equal their western counterparts in military and economic matters. This kind of cultural influence is also a two way street. There have been clear examples of this during the hippy era when non-western clothing styles, such as native American clothing, gained popularity temporarily. I don’t think this is strictly an Occident versus the world phenomenon either. In the west itself, the propensity of people to wear their traditional dress has also declined. It is not worn in offices anymore, neither is it worn as much for formal events such as funerals and weddings. I think the west’s reluctance to dress up is part of a wider change away from formality and strict social norms in general.
This standardization is not all bad either since it opened a mostly unified global market to clothing producers while also favoring cultural compatibilty, by making foreign people more familiar. All in all we seem to have traded diversity for homogeneity and although I am a fan of standardization in many cases, I think in this case we might all be culturally poorer for it.