FASHION & IDENTITY

- By Bhavika Jain

Identity and fashion is locked in an intimate relationship given the nature of personal expressiveness and social expectations. Personal expressiveness is given in the shape of freedom to express what we feel is our true identity or who we want to be, and our personal style is a tool to immediately set us apart, or blend in with the crowd.

Fashion has a longstanding relationship with both social and personal identity, and is one of the most visible expressions of it. The way we dress can communicate to others how we portray ourselves in different social situations, underlined by social expectations and norms, to how we express our sense of true self.

Clothes, shoes, accessories, and even body modifications, like piercings, tattoos, hair dye, and cosmetic surgery, are all a part of fashion in one way or another. Somehow we decide why we want those jeans, that pair of shoes, or our first tattoo. Considering we are highly complex individuals who absorb many different characteristics throughout our lives, identity is a complicated concept.

Appearance style visually articulates multiple and overlapping identities such as gender, race, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, age, national identity, and personal interests, aesthetic, and politics. Not all of these identities are consciously present at any given moment; power relations influence one's awareness of one identity or another. Fashion-susceptible ambivalences include the interplay between youth versus age, masculinity versus femininity, or high versus low status, among many other possibilities within and across identities.

Hence, Fashion is a strong reflect of the multidimensional aspect of our identities. It has the power to communicate a hundred different things about ourselves, all at once.