I’m fascinated by the fashion trends of the younger generation. I think many young people actually lack a sense of irony, which makes it possible for them to wear tight blue jeans, converse hi-tops, and tight vintage t-shirts as a sincere fashion statement. Irony requires context and I don’t think you can have that context without experience. Yet fashion is so mutable because it develops best in a world without context or reference, where everything is novel. Everything old becomes new again.
I enjoy observing the way people dress and how they speak. You can judge a book by its cover. Clothing says a lot about your desired group identity and what you want other people to think about you. I don’t buy into the argument that how a person decides to dress has nothing to do with what other people think about them. If this were the case, people would wear really socially unacceptable costumes. Even if you dress to reflect your own purely unique personal taste or aesthetic you signal group affiliation, cultural attitudes, and personal politics. Anyway, one thing I’ve noticed is the prevalence among hipsters of keychains worn on the belt loop. This is, of course, the direct result of wearing skin-tight blue jeans.
What does it mean that I have all these prom dresses / fancy underthings / bizarre accessories and all I ever wear are jeans and t-shirts?
I think you can judge a book by its cover up to a point and gain a certain amount of insight, but it’s fairly limited. As you put it, it has to do with “desired group identity,” not actual group identity or actual personality characteristics or whatever. Basically how someone dresses can tell you a lot about how they would like to be seen (or whether they care how others see them, or whether they’d prefer people not to notice them or know things about them), but they can only imply what’s under the surface.
Maybe, you want to be able to feel like you can wear those things? Or, they represent some ideal representation of how you would like to be seen?
Good point, what if someone fails miserably in communicating their desired identity?
On the last thing–I was thinking more along the lines of what if your communicated identity is really fake? I mean, they’re all fake. But what if you saw a kid in goth regalia walking down the street–you’d assume he had a gaggle of goth friends, and that he listened to certain music and stuff. But what if this guy missed the point, didn’t have the right ethos or wasn’t depressed/angry/etc. enough, didn’t know anything about the right bands or movies or whatever, and was rejected by the other goths he encountered? He wouldn’t belong to the group except in the sense of being categorized on an external level as one of those kids who wears black all the time and wears eyeliner and combat boots and stuff.
I do think that I have this other version of myself that I walk around with where I am this sassy person who wears all these things that in real life I find cute and interesting but can’t bring myself to wear more than once or twice. Sometimes I do feel like I have this secret side that likes clothes and is more feminine and that a lot of people who know me might be surprised by it.
I was also going to say that this reminds me a lot of something you said to me some time ago, when you were making some changes to the way you dressed, about not wanting people to be able to look at you and know too much about you. I think if you aim to look nondescript in a nice-looking but unremarkable sort of way that on one hand it could be an effective means of scrambling people’s normal categorization systems, but it also says something about you if people care to notice–I mean, it says that you would like to be mildly well-regarded but don’t want to stand out or seem like a particular sort of person.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean in your last paragraph. Are you saying maybe it is a desire to not take a risk as to what other people might perceive due to my clothing choices? Or, that I run the risk of not being remarkable?
I’ve found in my own personal experience that it has been helpful to me to be visually amorphous in terms of my costume (kinda like a scramble suit) since it allows one to move between different groups by changing other more subtle things. Ah, but does that mean you never really belong? Probably. I have rarely felt like I have belonged anywhere in particular.
In social situations it is helpful to meet people in their own mental territory. The trade off, as I think you’ve pointed out, is that you run the risk of not standing out, etc. On the other hand, I want to be liked for what is inside rather than what can be superficially understood. I have had many situations where lately where I have learned a lot from people I might have routinely dismissed previously just based on assumptions I made about them visually. So, I guess my attempts to blend in visually functions to put people at ease so that you can have a chance to make more than a superficial impression and so that there is a chance for communion once you get past the surface assumptions. This is muddled, but I have trouble writing in these small boxes.
I guess I just meant that if you don’t want people to notice you and/or know things about you by looking at you, that it does seem like a bit of a defensive/distancing sort of impulse.
I can see how dressing a certain way could make it easier to move between different groups. But I think most people who dress in a rather generic casual way would probably make the transition about as well. I mean, as long as you don’t have a mohawk or giant skater pants or huge jewelry or a renaissance festival dress or facial tattoos or some other rather unusual extreme signifier/s. I don’t think I’m a significantly less effective social chameleon now than I would be if I started buying more of my clothes at the mall.
Oh, I agree that it can operate as a defensive/distancing maneuver. I think that’s the flipside of consciously dressing in order to have a particular social strategy.
I think I would make a distinction between generic clothing and a socially neutral costume. When I think of generic clothing, I imagine sweatpants, jeans, t-shirts, white socks, etc.