The Impact of Clothing

After reading Chapter 8 in the textbook by Delaney I began to think about my own experiences with clothing. I have gone through many changes in my life and they can all be seen through my clothing. I could tell you who my friends were by an outfit I might have worn in a picture, I could tell you who I was dating, and what occasion it was. Clothing represents a lot in my life, it at one point represented how I was feeling emotionally; my clothing changed through different transitions in my life, and it was also influenced by my peers.
My clothing didn’t reflect my own personal style till I was in Middle School. Up to that point my parents dressed me, or I put together my own outfits based on what my parents bought me. In Middle School I began to look at what my peers were wearing, and started to care about what other thought of me. Clothing was my way of fitting in, I always noticed that if someone is wearing the right outfit they will generally fit in during a social situation, and in Middle School it is a very huge “social situation.” I was happy in Middle School, I wore a lot of bright colors, a pass time for my friends and I was to go shopping for popular clothes, or critique what are favorite stars are wearing, and I listened to whatever music was popular at the time. Then I hit High School. I started listening to different music and having harder times in my life. I began to wear darker clothes, and didn’t care what pop culture said I should wear. I made friends based on my clothing choices because the punk kids that used to make fun of me for being preppy now saw me as one of them. I acted differently when I started to wear different clothing, I spoke differently (I stopped using the word “whatever”).
As I got older I got a boyfriend that had a different style than me. I changed my choice of clothing, yet again, and again made different friends and listened to different music. This point in my life was not as emotional as my “teen angst” years, and you could see this from the clothing I chose, the colors were dark, but not gothic. I always seemed to feel a little out of place wearing that clothing because I didn’t choose this style I chose it for someone else. Now I have a style that is purely mine. It changed after high school; I started to wear more “sophisticated” clothing in the sense that my shirts don’t have stupid sayings on them or strange designs. I realized that I am going to be in an adult world, so I need to start dressing respectively.
Through analyzing my own experience with clothing I am able to see how my clothing choices affected my peer group, it changed my music tastes, it changed my language, and it made me play a role that the clothing represented in society consciously and subconsciously. Ever since I was a little girl I have always known clothing had a significant meaning, I could distinguish between adults and children and I could always tell what I was going to do for the day depending on the clothing I was going to wear. If I wore something fancy I knew it was a holiday, if I wore something old I knew it was a play day, and if I wore my everyday clothing I was generally going to school. I got older I was able to categorize people by the clothing that they wore. I could tell if someone was rich by the name brand they were wearing, I could tell what music they listened to due to their specific style, and I was able to see employment based on the clothing the person was wearing. I used clothing to decide where I was going to be accepted, I wasn’t going to go up to a gothic person bright pink shirt, and I used clothing to express my emotions. Clothing is an important part of my life because when examined holistically it represents many aspects of my life and how clothing affects the social situations we face every day.