Wear your ‘wear’
Culture and everyday fashion icons; one could very easily identify among ourselves one Britney spears and one Saif Ali khan within a ratio of at least five (more specifically) university students/goers. This act of being overtly concerned about one's looks and dressing sense interestingly gets cliché termed as “wannabe culture”.
However, what The Standpoint expected this wave to be (which could perhaps refer to the aping of the west), on interviewing students was not the expected one. In other words, the understanding of the situation drew a more transparent picture for us.
Here's a sneak peek to our discovery.
Ayan, studying in IIT believes that “there are enough stimuli around to drive us into frenzy when it comes to choosing our dressing style”. He relates to the popular representation of male actors and artists on television and quite blatantly admits to have taken "inspiration" from some of them to boost his own wardrobe. What’s more? On asking him if this is blindly aping of the west cult that has been abuzz lately, he tells us-“every student in the campus has their sense of style which is reinforced by something or someone, if I am being honest, others may choose not to be!”
Very well inspired with the above statement, we decided to delve more into the on-going debate on sense of dressing.
Interestingly, we found a counter discourse to Ayan in Siddharth studying in Hansraj college(D.U) who believes that his dressing pattern is ‘completely’ HIS OWN and if he is questioned on it’s supposed inspiration, he would have but one thing to say-“my dressing sense defines myself for me, where do I see ‘the other’ anyway?”
Rohini Chopra, who has just returned from U.K after having pursued an MBA, aligned much to Siddharth's French liberatarian ideas (so to say). She puts in “you just can wear anything and define your own style without defining style at all”.
What is most startling is that after having had a discourse that relates itself to a “hip-hop climate”, where we see youngsters very nonchalantly clinging on to their own iconic mentors, we see a level of the notion of emancipated self-identity intertwined to the former phenomena. For instance, if you find a certain Aniruddha (Statistics Hons, Venkateshwara College), sporting a completely ‘devil may care attitude’ to the likes of Eminem, he might as well tell you “my style is MY style”, instead of not perhaps accepting the complete infiltration of an alien perception of the dress code in him.
The observation here is that even if there is a lot of improvisation within the dressing pattern of A-individual, the stock or base is derived (if one could say that). It is as though there is a strong extraction of the western/modern culture (in one's dressing) without losing the quintessential existence. The cyclical pattern of the responses we received helped us to enjoin both the notions together instead of dissecting them. So unlike what a lot of us thought were merely “aping of the other” is actually an amalgamation of both inspiration and novelty.
With the end of this discovery, we(if nothing else) can surely assure, that people who believe in one's dressing pattern to be a result of a borrowed identity would with this column, DEFINITELY have to rethink.
Wishing you a happy thought!
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