You are not your clothes

Wearing a mismatch of differently colored and styled shirts under a blue flannel button-up shirt, paired with maroon athletic pants and standard white karate shoes, junior Peter Lucier looked like a random selection of yesterday’s laundry load.

“Day to day, I just grab stuff off my floor and put it on,” he said.

The former fashion model said that he used to be concerned with looking clean and neat and keeping his clothes pristine. However, that’s not the case for him anymore.

“I was tired of being a package, [tired of] people telling me to wear this or look like this,” he said.

Lucier is more concerned with the way people treat fashion. A recent trend has been to wear Arabic scarves as an accessory, and many men and women around campus have bought into this craze.

Lucier sees this trend as another indication of the overall lack of awareness in clothes and what they are supposed to represent.

“First off, they’re meant for women,” he said. “Secondly, they’re not just a piece of cloth — they represent something to Arabic people. It bothers me when people don’t have a sense of cultural awareness when it comes to fashion. The only reason I think some people are doing it is because it’s become a trend.”

In Lucier’s opinion, the lack of awareness people display in what they wear shows that they really do not know what they’re wearing, and thus clothing as a representation of oneself does not exist when it come to trends.

“I think fashion is the biggest disconnect that people have from how they look,” Lucier said. “I think this disconnect comes from why people [look the way they do], and when you ask people that, most people don’t have an answer. People don’t know or appreciate what they’re wearing half the time.”

However, fashion is still a marker of, not only social status, but socio-economic class standing as well.

“The biggest prejudice I’ve ever seen is judging people on how they look,” Lucier said. “You’ll never, ever meet people if you just look at them and decide who they are. Clothes are not you. They are not who you are or what you represent. “

Junior Jen Mao agrees that clothes cannot fully convey who a person is.

“You can’t really express [a person’s] multiple layers through pants or skirts,” she said.

Wearing a large red, patterned sweater over green and grey layered shirts and a long copper skirt, Mao’s style is definitely for comfort and not for fashion.

“I dress to please myself, and if people like it, then that’s fine, but if they think my sweater is horrible, then that’s their business too,” Mao said.

Lucier feels the same way about his personal style.

“To me, I look normal because this is how I perceive myself,” Lucier said. “If people can step up and own up to themselves [then] they’re not self-conscious. It’s the people who have to look cute that need to prove something to themselves.”

Both students agree that clothes are for comfort, and they want to encourage others to dress like how they feel and feel good about it.

“I don’t think other people should try to kill themselves to necessarily look good or attain this societal ideal of what they should look like,” Mao said.

Lucier believes that the value people put in fashion should represent what they are comfortable with, instead of letting a company tell them what to look like.

“Whatever you’re comfortable in, whatever you find that just works for you — absolutely good. Whatever you feel like you look good in that day — put it on,” Lucier said. “But don’t let other people tell you s* and don’t let yourself get self-conscious about what you’re supposed to look like.”