Fashion, Custom, and Human Folly — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne pardons our habit of taking local manners as the only standard of perfection; almost everyone walks the road their ancestors trod.

Romans once mocked bearded Greeks, then required beards themselves; they banned foreign dress, then imitated it; dietary, burial, and mourning rules flip with fashion. When the change arrives, people insist the new custom was always obviously right, as if madness had erased memory.

He cites Persius on men who cannot walk abroad without being stared at and mocked, and notes Argian and Roman ladies mourning in white, as France once did. Whole books could be written, he says, yet the lesson is simple: custom is not nature, only the mood of the moment wearing a crown.