The physics of trend
Really, trends are just the silliest things. Through my (long and fruitful) life so far, I've lived through (and, I admit, participated in) some pretty out-there trends. There was the prevailing high school trend of tying your sweater around your waist, but you could never tie it around your waist because that was fashion suicide; you had to tie it around your hips, and the larger the risk of the sweater slipping off and falling into a heap around your ankles, the more trendy. There was the trend where you had to roll up the sleeves of your school uniform t-shirt, or risk social marginalization. There was the trend where god forbid if anyone can see your socks, and everyone rushed out to buy the Nike/Reebok sports socks, which do the least possible to cover your feet and protect them from chafing against your shoes, and cost triple the price of normal socks.
Outside school, trends are just as prevalent. You only have to look at the Avril Lavigne hand-sock-and-loose-tie look. But these trends pale in silliness comparison to the one I read about in the papers today - apparently, it's not enough that eyebrow, lip and general body piercing have become "in", but a new "craze" has hit the fashion markets: tongue splitting. That's right, forking your tongue. Your tongue is clamped up, numbed and cut 5cm up the middle, to give you, essentially, a forked tongue. There is a picture, and it looks like a piece of butcher's meat, or some kind of maimed slab of liver, and absolutely nothing like a snake's forked tongue, which is slender, flexible, and oh, by the way, completely natural.
I think that's definitely one of the silliest trends - self-mutilation in the name of fashion. The silliest fashion quirks can become crazes overnight. I imagine there is some kind of particle responsible for it, like trendions or fashiontrons or something. Everything emits fashiontrons and trendions, but some things such as The-Act-Of-Wearing-Your-Collar-Up emit higher amounts of fashiontrons and trendions than, say, Wearing-Flannel-Trousers. These particles can actually move at light speed, since all it takes is one photograph of a "trendy outfit" to frazzle someone's neural pathways into thinking "god I've got to wear that, never mind that the model is anorexically stick thin and I'm bordering on continental, if I wear that I'm sure I'll look just as good". Fashiontrons and trendions can also move at the speed of sound, e.g. the amount of time it takes to hear from the school grapevine that if your school skirt isn't three inches above your knees by Monday morning, you will be a social outcast.
As soon as these particles hit a lifeform, they start to terminally alter the genetic sequence of the individual concerned. Thus, people become seized with inexplicable desires to run to the stores to buy an accessory designed to shade their eyes from the sun, and then proceed to wear RayBans to nightclubs, and so on and so forth. Incidentally: plants, rocks and animals seem to possess a natural resistance to fashiontrons and trendions, and so I believe I could make a fortune by extracting the resistant parts of their genetic makeup and inventing some kind of antidote or force field.
And so it is my conviction that there should be a scale of trend radiation (trendiation?) upon which all trends are measured, and the higher the rating, the greater the particle emission of trendions/fashiontrons, and therefore, the more trendy. We could rate the silliness and strength of the trend using a similar system to alpha/beta/gamma rays, with the latter classification being the most potent and most lethal, such as e.g. the idea that being white is better than being black, and then following up on it by proceeding to alter everything you were born with, with plastic that melts at room temperature, hi Michael Jackson. We could even measure the lapse between time of exposure to fashiontrons and trendions and time of effect of the particles, e.g. amount of time between seeing Avril Lavigne in a tie and going out to buy one. This could be called the Rachel Differential - the smaller the differential, the more trend-conscious you are....
Well, I'll shut up now, before I get carried awa...too late.