Fashion

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp

Do you know who you are? You may be thinking that's a stupid question and of course you know who you are. But I think that most people really don't. From the time we're born, we are told who we are and who we should be by both our family and all the other adults in our lives. All of whom can't possibly know who we really are. The truth is that only we can ever really know that. But when we are small children, we think that the adults know everything so they must know everything there is to know about us too. They must know who we are. And who we should be. And once we have learned the ideas of a few key people, they often stay throughout our lives.

Once we have learned that our family thinks we are lazy or not too bright or whatever, we start to act that way because we, as small children, think that that must be who we are. Which confirms their expectations and leads to a downward spiral of increasing negativity. And often these messages are reinforced by marketing messages designed to get you to buy the latest thing that will cure all the problems you think you have and even new ones you never knew you had.

Because you don't know who you are, you continue to let other people define you. It takes a great deal of courage and self-awareness to break free of other people's opinions of you and how you should behave. It is much easier to just go along with the fashions that are the main indicator of society's expections of social acceptability. It takes courage for a man, for example, to go around with long hair when all the men around him are sporting crew cuts. And it takes the self-awareness to know that crew cuts are just not suitable for him. Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are. Do you know who you really are? Would you dare to express yourself in a way that runs counter to the fashions you see in everyone around you?