Armies and civil institutions are characterized by their uniforms to show their group as a collective and collaborating body of people. Preparatory school systems work much along the same line of thought and use school uniforms as a means to induce collaboration and teamwork. The antithesis of course, is individuality and is a common theme among young people in high school and college and the urge to be original fuels the wardrobes of millions of young adults every day. But even as students search for their own fashion style, where do they get their ideas from? They get their clothing sense from their friends, magazines, television, and the internet. If you ever visit the suburbs, just sit down on a bench in the middle of a shopping plaza, or a park, and see how many people walk by wearing plaid shorts and polo shirts. They might be from different brands, have different graphics plastered on them, but they’re the same piece of clothing over, and over, and over again.
If I had a dollar for every person that dressed the same in the suburbs; I would be rich enough to afford the clothing to make me look just like them, but since that’s not the case, I’m forced to analyze the reasoning behind this phenomenon that we can refer to as the Plaid Shorts Army. Imagine with me now hundreds of people, one after the other, wearing the same plaid shorts in the same color walking down the street. A scene right out of George Orwell’s 1984 is what you might be thinking. Though as improbable as the hypothetical situation sounds, it’s not too far off from reality. Forget the plaid shorts; let us take something more eclectic that people would commonly see as individuality at its best.
Emo, Punk, and Goth are all seen as subcultures marked by their pushing back against mainstream conformity; but how much of that is actually a lashing back? The fact that we can group each of those subcultures by their fashion styles, attitudes, and lifestyles makes it very clear that there is a strict conformity in each of those groups. It’s merely a thin façade which makes the masses assume these groups are any different than their own. What this leads to is a series of questions: do people naturally clump together and conform? Is individuality nothing more than a short moment in time before it’s appropriated by the masses? Is there anyway to superficially represent you as an individual?
If I had a dollar for every person that dressed the same in the suburbs; I would be rich enough to afford the clothing to make me look just like them, but since that’s not the case, I’m forced to analyze the reasoning behind this phenomenon that we can refer to as the Plaid Shorts Army. Imagine with me now hundreds of people, one after the other, wearing the same plaid shorts in the same color walking down the street. A scene right out of George Orwell’s 1984 is what you might be thinking. Though as improbable as the hypothetical situation sounds, it’s not too far off from reality. Forget the plaid shorts; let us take something more eclectic that people would commonly see as individuality at its best.
Emo, Punk, and Goth are all seen as subcultures marked by their pushing back against mainstream conformity; but how much of that is actually a lashing back? The fact that we can group each of those subcultures by their fashion styles, attitudes, and lifestyles makes it very clear that there is a strict conformity in each of those groups. It’s merely a thin façade which makes the masses assume these groups are any different than their own. What this leads to is a series of questions: do people naturally clump together and conform? Is individuality nothing more than a short moment in time before it’s appropriated by the masses? Is there anyway to superficially represent you as an individual?
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