We have all once heard that if you want to be viewed as a certain person, we must dress in a certain way to appear as if we are who we want to be, correct?
Yes? No?
Well, if you have, you will be familiar with reading about the good and the bad in fashion, what is "wrong" and was is "right," and what's in and what was so 2002.
For those who have never heard that phrase, you will be able to read about the binaries of fashion and style.
Who made the rules?
Who gets to decide?
And did anyone ever say there were rules for what to dress in?
Or were these silly little rules created by ideas of those who live in a world that is all about judging others?
I bet there are no actual rules that were once created and meant to stay forever, how would it make sense to make concrete rules about something like fashion that is constantly changing. It changes so incredibly fast, it isn't even every year, the way people dress and what they call "in" changes so quickly, seasonally. People make up rules as time goes, never have I ever ran into an official rule book for what to wear and how to wear it.
The way every individual dress shouldn't be coming from a rule book anyway! That's the amazing thing about style, everyone is different, even the same piece can be wore in thirty different ways and look completely different on each person.
What fun would it be if we walked around in uniform?
This week in English, we read Michel Foucault's amazing piece, "Panopticism." In this piece, he made it clear that his idea of the way the world worked was by having power everywhere and controlling everyone. We aren't actually as free as we think we are, everything we do is being governed in some type of way. There is really no way of avoiding the power that there is over us. We are under rule anywhere in society that we are, in schools, hospitals, jails, and even at work. The only choices we really have, are to choose over the good and the bad.
If we take a step back and look at fashion through Foucaudian lenses, we would see that we are also being policed over what we wear. The reason is that society makes these "rules" they're never written or posted anywhere. The problem is that everyone has different opinions, nobody has the same idea for a rule.
Take a red, long dress, ask three different people the rule about wearing the dress. One answer would probably sound like this, "you have to be tall in order tower that dress." Another might be something like this, "if you're dark skin you shouldn't be wearing a red dress in the first place. And the last comment might be, "if you're fat, just don't even think about wearing that dress."
So we took one simple piece of clothing, and asked ONLY three different people for the "rule" for wearing that piece and all answers were different.
What that says to me is that, there is o such thing as a rule for what to wear, society just makes them up. How hard to please the million fashion polices of this world!
If people are worrying about the way they are socially policed, they will never be at peace within themselves. Every individual has a different, unique way of adorning they're body and worrying about pleasing others shouldn't be at the top of their priority list.
We are being watched anywhere and everywhere we go, and no matter what end of the fashion binary we choose, we will still be judged.
Fashion and style is only one of the infinitely many examples of the way Michel Foucault explains that everywhere we go we are being watched, and it is entirely up to you if you want to choose the "good binary" or the "bad" one. The reason I quote it is because nobody ever told us what end of the binary was the good one, society only made the good binary the road that most people would choose.
So, overall, there are no rule books, rules are made as we go by society, and they evolve just like human, animals, and plants evolve over time.
