Identity Decore

Tattoos, piercings, accessories and hair styles – do these things reflect our identity or do we use them to create our identity? A chicken or the egg scenario you might say. My guess is that you’d argue quite strongly that how you dress and present yourself is a direct reflection of your identity, and that this identity is intrinsic to you. I would agree that our characters or natures are innate to us to a certain extent – but why is it necessary to present ourselves in a certain way to reflect and communicate that identity? And is the way you present yourself a reflection of who you are, or who you would like to be?

One of the reasons I came to ponder this question is due to the comments I’ve received from some of my friends regarding my appearance. I am a rock/punk chick at heart, but I am not tattooed, pierced, made up, or have a hot hair cut and color. People I know have told me – “you should get pierced”, “you should get some tattoos, you’d look hot!”. So far I have resisted the desire of others to turn me into some kind of carbon copy Suicide Girl.

Why do they suggest I make these kinds of changes to my appearance? I think it’s because there is a perceived discordance between the type of person I am and how I look. And an underlying belief that if you’re into certain things you should look a certain way. These friends know what music I’m into and what beliefs I hold. So as a consequence it is expected, and encouraged, that I present myself in a manner that reflects these things. I’m supposed to adorn myself and my body with the signs and symbols of the culture(s) that I identify with. But with my unstyled hair and nerd grrl glasses I look more like a daggy sci-fi geek than a music geek, and therefore, incidentally, I don’t communicate through my appearance “what I’m about”.

Like most people there have been times when I’ve thought about having my hair dyed and getting a tattoo, but I can’t escape the feeling of falseness these things invoke in me. What others might see as a “natural extension and expression of identity”, in my case I see these things as a calculated manipulation of how I can make others see me. If I exchange my glasses for contact lenses I’ll look hotter. If I get my hair colored and styled I’ll look more rock. If I get a tattoo I’ll look more hardcore, and thus BE more hardcore. The truth is I’m hot, rock and hardcore without those things, but as people tend to use shallow criteria based on how people decorate themselves to figure out what kind of person someone is, I am not considered to be any of the above. And that’s fine with me. I could dress and present myself in way that would communicate to the world my internal identity, but with the money I have, I’d prefer to spend it on records, rather than on fashions and decorations that would communicate to others what records I might have.

It seems to me that we use appearance to judge and attract others, and consequently, instead of taking the time to talk to people to get to know and understand them, we take a glance. From this glance we derive information from which we make a judgment about them. We don’t admit to, or perhaps are not conscious of this, but we know it. And the fact we know it is illustrated by the care we take in our presentation, so when people take a glance at us, they will derive the “right” information and make the judgment about us that we want them to. All this apparent manipulation makes me wonder when we really connect on a human to human level, rather than with the illusions of identity.

In alternative/punk/hardcore circles we tend to mock mainstream people for being fashion victims and blindly following the trends. I don’t know why we laugh at them, because from my point of view there is a fashion that people emulate in so-called alternative scenes as well. For a community which immortalizes individuality, I am continually surprised and disappointed with the uniformity and conformity with which these ‘individuals’ present themselves. Yes, we look different from mainstream types, but among ourselves, we share “a look”. So in that sense I don’t think that makes us that different from “them” at all.

Spikes and studs anyone?