Fashion allows us to externally present aspects of ourselves to world around us, we can conform, hide ourselves, blend into the background or we can stand out, peacock and draw attention if we want. It can be used to show you’re part of a subculture, punk, goth, mod, jock, nerd, whatever category of person you want to be or feel you belong to.
It also allows us to be chameleon’s, we could dress differently every day if we wanted… most people don’t though which is a shame, dressing up is fun. You might be accused of being a poser, or of being flaky.
Other people can be judgemental, jealous and salty little nutsacks.
As well as being expressive, clothes can also be utilitarian and practical, like army or hiking gear. Uniforms can help people feel like they belong, identify helpers or even enemies!
Fashion isn’t a subject I’ve ever really been interested in because I don’t really understand it, I don’t have an eye for fashion or style.
As a young ‘un, I used to get hand me downs and wear whatever I was given and I didn’t care, because what I wore had nothing to do with who I was as a person.
I still think that’s true of a lot of people.
In my mid-teens I started to pay attention, I wanted to dress a certain way, I’d found my niche. I wanted to be an indie kid.
All I can say is that I’m glad smart phones weren’t around as I experimented with fashion, I wore some awful things…
It’s expected that teenagers take an interest in fashion and wear weird things. I tried things out to see what suited me and honestly what I landed on was very tame. It was pretty ordinary and I was only slightly alternative looking, yet I was punished for it regularly by strangers on the street where I lived.
So much so that it made me hide myself.
I also think having long hair that hung just past my shoulders didn’t help. I’d regularly get shouted at, accused of being gay (so close!) called a hippy and quite often mistaken for a women… because y’know women have long hair.
For context, I grew up in Erith and Bexleyheath and was attempting to come out of my shell at the end of the 90’s.
So teenage experimentation with fashion is sort of acceptable/expected in society, but I still got hassled for it. People love to bemoan what the young people are doing these days. Remember the jeans half revealing your arse/pants trend?
Who cares right? Nothing changed because of it.
These days fashion doesn’t necessarily reflect a person’s interests or affiliation with a subculture. I got very confused recently when a 19 year old customer of mine, dressed very goth, wasn’t really into the music but liked the aesthetic, she listened to J-Pop!
This reinforces an idea I have that social media and the internet has fragmented subcultures so much that you can find a very specific group to belong to. Goth’s into J-Pop! I can’t decide if this is good or bad. I am in favour of diverse, Transmetropolitan city streets though and subverting expectations is quite fun.
Decade defining music and fashion trends don’t really happen anymore and those two things would often go hand in hand.
I know someone into Rockabilly when I see one.
Fashion is art, fashion is a language, fashion communicates a LOT, it’s cultural shorthand.
Fashion reinforces gender norms, fashion deconstructs gender norms, it plays, experiments and allows freedom of expression, it represents every aspect of the human experience and it’s incredibly diverse.
And yet, it’s simply fabric, textiles, colours and patterns. They are just clothes.
So why are we so judged, subject to abuse and ridicule for something as arbitrary as clothes?
Most of us play it safe, we want to fit in because we don’t want the world to smack us down. But if everybody experimented more, changed their style daily, mixed up gendered clothing, then play would be far more normalised. So why don’t we?
It’s risky, nobody wants to invite ridicule or a punch in the face! I also guess it’s a lot of effort and it would cost loads to have an expansive wardrobe. But I think the main reasons are that people either don’t care that much or have found their fashion comfort zone.
Part of that is because of traditional gender roles and the invisible rules that exist around that. Some blurring of those boundaries has been happening for decades, but this is recent history, if you went further back in time fashions have been bonkers.
Women can wear jeans, trousers, suits, have short hair and still be feminine thanks to fashion and that’s one of the only areas of society where women truly have more freedom. But a man in a dress… Holy shit, the world loses it’s mind!
Why isn’t this allowed? Why can’t men wear dresses seriously? Why can’t we all play with gendered clothing?
Society won’t collapse because of what we’re wearing, although that’s what the traditional conservatives would have you believe.
There’s also a very moral and judgemental aspect to fashion.
A common and incredibly vile question that is asked in cases of sexual assault is ‘What were they wearing?’
As though the clothes you wear are inviting rape and you are somehow to blame?!
‘Well, what did they expect, going out dressed like that?‘
Nobody is asking for it, nobody expects it, nobody deserves it. Get outta here with that victim blaming horseshit.
Current trans panic about toilet use is also relevant, as idiots claim that men will dress up as women in order to gain access to women’s spaces in order to rape them…
Please go ahead and ask a random man on the street if he’d be comfortable putting on a dress in public and walking around a shopping centre or High Street.
You would get very few takers.
Men are scared to do that, especially victims and perpetuators of toxic masculinity!
I personally think that we should all be able to wear anything we want without fear. Clothes shouldn’t be a big deal and society should be more permissive and flexible when it comes to our presentation.
The argument against this is that is makes women’s spaces easier to access and it’s inviting in potential rapists and murderers.
This can’t be proved either way because that’s not where we are as a society, in fact the recent law change that forces trans people to use the toilet that aligns with their gender assigned at birth, (in order to protect cis women from sexual assault) has absolutely backfired and caused cis gendered women that present a little masc to be viewed with suspicion and publicly challenged.
Imagine, the nightmare scenario, human society made up of people wearing any gendered clothing they wanted, using any public toilet they wanted!
What would the rape and murder stats be then?
Probably about the same. What possible bearing does using a certain toilet, or wearing certain clothes have on the number of rapists and murderers that exist in the world? It certainly won’t create new ones.
It’s such a weird correlation to try and make. The question then becomes, ‘What was the rapist wearing?’
Opportunity is the worry, but the scapegoat could no longer be the trans community because clothing doesn’t make you trans and that’s always been true!
The scapegoat would be clothes.
Whereas the real blame lies with the rapists and murderers of the world who can be any gender, race, religion or sexuality. Restricting trans people’s rights and freedoms doesn’t offer any real protection against those crimes, it merely gives the illusion of reduced risk and amplifies transphobia.
I can’t help but feel if fashion and gendered clothing was more interchangeable and culturally acceptable, then the transgender issues wouldn’t be so blown out of proportion or weaponised.
Isn’t it strange that we give so much power to clothing?
Something that isn’t even us, just a costume to help communicate something about ourselves so that we can be understood and accepted.
Break the ‘rules’, wear what you want.
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