Fashion's role in shaping social identities and cultural expression

Fashion

When a woman walks down the street carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag and strutting in her Jimmy Choos, what does she say about herself? Her lifestyle? Where she is from? When a man walks down the street carrying a fake Louis Vuitton handbag and strutting in her cheap plastic pumps, what is he saying about himself? When Trayvon Martin walked through his neighborhood wearing a hoodie, George Zimmerman instantly thought he was a thug. Why? Because dress is intimately tied up with the expression of personal and collective identity. Clothing does make the man, and the woman. Television shows like What Not to Wear are small windows into the reality that external appearances shape personal psychological factors such self-esteem; and clothing also impacts the way other people react. Research in psychology and sociology shows that in addition to the way clothing shapes personal identity, appearance is a marker of social or collective identity. Cultural norms shape the way people dress, which can be a facet of ethnicity. Subcultural identities have differential dress codes. Gender remains one of the most striking ways dress expresses group identity. Furthermore, appearance marks social status and lifestyle. Fashion is more than a form of self-expression and personal identity formation; fashion is an expression of cultural affiliation, social status, and community identity.

Clothing marks the individual with group membership, making it so that members of the in-group recognize the individual as "one of us," and so that members of the out-group recognize the individual as "one of them." In-group/out-group status is a subject widely studied in sociology, psychology, and anthropology literature. New research reveals that in-group/out-group status becomes literally hard wired. In "Social identity shapes social perception and evaluation: Using neuroimaging to look inside the social brain," Van Bavel, Xiao, and Hackel (2012) reveal the neurological component to the way fashion shapes identity. In the Van Bavel, Xiao, and Hackel (2012) research, the authors assigned participants to two groups wearing team jerseys. The team jerseys were arbitrarily designed; that is, they were not reflective of any actual sports club or gang affiliation. Assigning an equal number of black and white participants to each jersey group (lions and tigers), the researchers tested for neurological reactions using fMRI brain scans. As predicted, the brains of the members of the tigers reacted differently to their "kind," regardless of race. "Participants had greater amygdala activity to in-group (i.e., same-team) than out-group (i.e., other-team) faces" regardless of task or race conditions (Van Bavel, Xiao, and Hackel, 2012, p. 11). Therefore, the identity formations and social labels become hard-wired, making the connection between fashion and status a solid one.

What's more, research shows that in-group/out-group status matters in terms of it having a strong impact on human behavior. Using two experimental designs, Levine et al. (2005) found, "an injured stranger wearing an in-group team shirt is more likely to be helped than when wearing a rival team shirt or an unbranded sports shirt," (p. 443). Clothing can, therefore, save a person's life. In the Levine et al. (2005) research, participants were even more likely to help a stranger in an emergency situation when the victim wore an opposing team jersey than when the victim wore no jersey at all. The corollary research reveals the significance of lifestyle factors on collective identity formation. Just as clothing reveals which team an individual belongs to, clothing also reveals the fact that an individual participates in the social ritual of observing or playing sports.

Therefore, clothing demarcates group boundaries, providing a convenient way for the brain to process the status of a stranger. Like other visible markers of identity, such as race, ethnicity, or gender, clothing can lead to stereotyping. The Trayvon Martin case is one of the more obvious examples of how clothing creates stereotypes, and those stereotypes can have deleterious consequences both for the perceiver and the perceived. Research in the social sciences is unequivocal on the role that fashion plays in perception of others. For instance, Lamont and Molnar (2002) found that fashion creates, establishes, maintains, and subverts boundaries. Fashion is a factor in social and collective identity; including identities related to socio-economic class, ethnic/racial group, and gender/sex inequality. Moreover, clothing clearly delineates one's professional status or locus of professional activity, level of education and acquisition of certain types of knowledge, and participation in the sciences (Lamont and Molnar, 2002). Fashion is an outward sign of the formation of "communities, national identities, and spatial boundaries," (Lamont and Molnar, 2002, p.167). The relationship between clothing and identity (whether personal or collective) is a two way street. In other words, the way a person dresses enables the individual to express personal preferences and lifestyle choices as well as announce membership in a specific cultural group. At the same time, the group to which a person belongs can co-create expressions of style and fashion that are used to enforce social boundaries.

In research on how African-American communities create collective identity, Lamont and Molnar (2001) found a measurable, directional relationship between African-American consumption patterns and self-marking. African-Americans were found to use consumption to "defy racism and share collective identities most valued in American society (e.g. middle-class membership)" (Lamont and Molnar, 2001, p. 31). Fashion was also used to "simultaneously enact a positive vision of their cultural distinctiveness," (Lamont and Molnar, 2001, p. 31).