How Fashion Molds the Perception of Self: Being the Main Character in Your Life
Fashion is more than just styling with the latest trends or what you decide to throw on for your Zoom class. Fashion allows us to shape shift and embody the people we want to be, and when we feel confident in our clothes— we become invincible. Jamie Duncan highlights how we utilize fashion as the self-expression tool needed to convey our actual or desired genders to the world (2016). So, even though we are not all fashion icons, we are portraying our identity through our clothing choices regardless.
We often forget how we constantly make bold clothing statements and how we participate in the fashion world through those statements. In The Devil Wears Prada, the “blue sweater scene” highlights how pervasive fashion is. Meryl Streep’s character enlightens Anne Hathaway’s character as she explains how her seemingly simple choice of a blue sweater off of the racks at a department store symbolizes the cerulean blue that had been featured in fashion shows years before. The choice to not make a bold statement is still a bold statement because your outfit choices reflect how you perceive yourself and how you want to be perceived by others around you.
Being The Main Character
A phrase that has become popular from TikTok is being the “main character,” but this has been such a taboo topic up until now. Society makes you feel guilty about putting yourself first and seeing yourself as the most important person in your life; however, it is your life, so why not be the main character? In an interview with Sam Dalba, a freshman at UGA, he talked about how “the main character trend really comes down to self-love and self-care, such as getting dressed in clothes I feel confident in, [it] gives me such a boost in self-esteem.” Being the main character means that you put your goals first and you mold your life in a way that you are able to see yourself as the leading role. We use fashion to empower ourselves and create a window to see who we really are, or who we want to be.
Dressing as the main character is all about choosing pieces that reflect your true self and identity and dressing in a way you feel most empowered. Dalba also talked about how he “[has] statement pieces that are usually second hand because [he knows] that only [he] will have them.” Our fashion choices allow us to distinguish ourselves from everyone else, and it is important to have reminders that we are our own person. You even perform better when you are dressed well because “professional dress...increases abstract thinking and gives people a broader perspective.”(St. Louis, 2017). So, it is true that when you look better you feel better! You truly do become what you are wearing, and the best thing about fashion is that you can change your story everyday.