Boutiques such as Biba, designers like Mary Quant, and the television personalities like Cathy McGowan who popularised them became celebrated as much as the entertainers who wore their mod clothes.

Fashion trends changed rapidly, and the Carnaby Street shops did a brisk business from those trying to avoid seeming out of step with the latest craze.

Ray Davies saw all this and satirised the hypothetical extreme, a superficial dandy whose "clothes are loud but never square / It will make or break him so he's got to buy the best ...

[citation needed] It was performed with Davies mostly accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, with the rest of the band joining in on the "It will make or break him so he's got to buy the best 'cause..." and echoing the "Oh yes he is" lines in the refrain.

[10] The band attempted recording the song a number of times, playing with the arrangement, lyric diction, and guitar sounds.

"[13] Billboard said the song had a "clever, music-hall melody and lyric in the bag of [the Kinks] smash 'A Well Respected Man.

[15] Despite its commercial success, the song actually began to trigger some of the identity crises that would later plague Davies' personal life.

He wrote later: With 'A Dedicated Follower of Fashion' such a hit, people started coming up to me on the street and singing the chorus in my face: 'Oh yes he is, oh yes he is,' as if to say that I knew who I was.

Outside of fashion, the song's title has remained a metaphor for slavish conformity,[17] but in a more positive sense as an analogy for the growth of online social networks.