Are you what you wear?
Being in Los Angeles, USC has earned the reputation of being a hub for fashion. My friends and I once joked about the pressure to look good every day, and while “good” at my state university back home might mean the “fit/athletic” look — dressed in all lululemon at best — the bar is much higher at USC. One of my friends even told me that during her internship over the summer, she always showed up to work make-up free, but now she spends half an hour or more every morning on makeup and hair because she feels the pressure to look good on campus.
On the other hand, maybe you wake up, go to your closet in the morning and randomly pick out a sweater and put on a pair of jeans, all with your eyes still half-open. You may think that none of what goes on in the lofty high-fashion world has anything to do with you. Perhaps you’re trying to tell the world that you don’t care about what you put on your back, or perhaps you’re not trying to make any statement about yourself at all — simply trying to be. No unnecessary attention. No struggling to find an outfit to impress the public eye.
Unless you live life on the edge and present yourself as so comfortable in your own skin that you risk being arrested for public indecency, you do put on something in the morning, and, in doing so, you make a choice. That choice says something about you, whether you like it or not.
Indeed, you are what you wear in today’s society and what you throw on in the morning is a medium of forming identities from commodities. The fashion of politics has long been studied in the departments of gender studies, cultural history and other academic disciplines. There are inseparable links between culture, politics and aesthetics, all threaded together by clothing that can be directly observed in the real political world: Bernie Sanders’ suits are intentionally always too big, conveying his image of being too busy studying policy to change his clothes — the opposite of slick — while the GOP candidates and their zip-front-pullovers that seem straight out of a L.L.Bean catalog clearly make them more approachable and endearing than a suit would.
While miniskirts nowadays may symbolize the comeback of the Y2K aesthetic, they were first invented in the 1960s as a great fashion revolution, a symbol of women’s liberation in a time when whether a woman could expose her thighs was a dividing question in American society.
Feminist movements over the past few decades have made us realize the power of fashion as well as the implicit messages behind clothing. We are more conscious of who we are dressing for and why. While the hoodie and sweatpants look may not seem like anything more than a casual but comfortable outfit without much thought put into it, the very fact that women have the power to choose to wear gender-neutral clothes instead of being constricted to traditionally feminine clothing reveals fashion as the nexus of the political and the personal.
Even one’s indifference toward fashion speaks to something about one’s identity. Just as a person of color tends to be more aware of white privilege or a person of nonbinary identity is more likely to notice the gender binary in everyday life, those who don’t experience internal struggles with their identity — because they conform to socially constructed narratives of who they should be — are likely less concerned with carving their identities through external things like clothes.
In that sense, there is nothing simple about feeling comfortable in a simple white-tee: The absence of the need or desire to make statements through what you wear is, in itself, a privilege. Not everyone gets to feel comfortable in the style that is deemed the most appropriate and normal for them by society. For example, if the question of “who am I dressing for?” has never come across your mind, then you probably have not experienced what it feels like to have to dress for someone else by objectifying your body.
Class, politics and privilege are woven into clothes. What we wear has long been a tool and symbol for religious, social and political movements, and in an age where fashion is still intimately linked to our gender, cultural and religious identity and where the fashion industry’s impact on the environment is more noticeable than ever, we should make conscious dressing more relevant.