Ma`rifat Farhangi Ejtemaei

Owing to the extensive media publicity, the world has witnessed tremendous changes in the style of dress in recent decades. Insofar, most of these changes are not compatible with the norms and cultural values of society. The styles of dress in the form of a special lifestyle, such as ‘’ consumption of symbols ’’or ‘’ conspicuous consumption’’, which have influenced the different aspects of girls and women’s and identity, is moving towards a dire future. This paper sheds light on the theory of conspicuous consumption proposed by Veblen, who is responsible for modifying the style of dress in modern time, in order to analyze and criticize it according to the assessment criteria of social knowledge i.e. (criticism of internal and external logic, sociological and psychological validity, philosophical validity and functional validity). According to the results of assessment criteria, Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption is rendered unsuccessful because it lacks an all-embracing view about the desired aims, concentrates on the upper and lower levels, considers consumption as the basis of identity and supposes that man is passive and lacks free will before the assessment criteria.