The Identity in Aestheticism
Graphic Designer: Christine Jung
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken,” cry the famous words of Oscar Wilde. And yet, in today’s digital age, it seems we will be anything but ourselves.
Every post added to a Pinterest board, every diet and workout fad downloaded off TikTok just to seemingly disappear into the void of a camera roll. We call it “being inspired.” I often scroll through these folders of photos in bed each morning, cherry-picking my identity. Will I perform the role of the reclusive and alluring man in the back of the café, sipping a dark coffee as he scribbles furiously on a notepad, drawing the world around him? Or will I try on the academic, dancing around library bookshelves as if solving a problem with some groundbreaking invention? Sometimes, my Demonias will be left alone for months, then worn four times in one week, a part of the regular closet rotation. But whether I am this artist, academic, e-boy, or other, how could they all possibly be my identity?
Where do we differentiate identity from style? Clothes are empowering. Professor Karen J. Pine in the U.K. wrote “Mind What You Wear: The Psychology of Fashion” about the correlation between the physical experience of wearing clothes and the way you feel about yourself. Summarized by Mindy Scheier, adaptive fashion designer, in her TedTalk, Pine “states in her book that when you put clothes on, you adapt the characteristics of what you’re wearing, whether you realize it or not.”1 The freedom of wearing clothes and becoming confident, powerful, is something that makes fashion enticing. But sometimes, this confidence does not feel like it is truly ours. When we wear these clothes, curated, “inspired” by photos we’ve seen of other people, are we ourselves and confident, or are we pretending to be that model, that elusive figure with the perfectly matched shades of brown pants and Oxfords?
I think, with my experience of plenty of identity crises, I have some weight in the conversation. I find clothes often give me a sense of identity when the crushing pressures of the world to “know myself” and “be authentic” seem too big of an ask. I will happily sacrifice my identity for another day to not have to worry about categorizing it.
To categorize identity is to put limits on what should remain unlimited. Identity cannot be condensed to a summary; it cannot be constrained to one category. I cannot take my friends, place them in my filing cabinet under the words “smart,” “sad,” and “sarcastic,” and confidently close and lock that drawer. People are messy. They contain multitudes. There are layers to definitions. The issue with identity and defining yourself is that you must use adjectives. These descriptive words are meant to be used temporarily, yet we grasp them between our clenched fists and let the liquid of the word wash over our body like somehow it will tattoo its presence, seep into our skin, and cling to us forever. But I will not be bound to one identity forever.
There are different kinds of identities, ones I perhaps should have mentioned sooner. Things like race, gender, ethnicity, age, disability status, etc. cannot change. They are perhaps things that might take some figuring out and getting used to, especially with how some may present themselves and how the world may then see them, but they are virtually set in stone. That is what I like to call a Foundational Identity. What comes after that are more fluid things. Fluid Identities consist of likes, dislikes, favorite things, and more emotional states (how someone may be kind, lively, sarcastic, stoic, etc.). Identity is complex because it is all-encompassing. To compare this to something of scale: imagine defining the universe in one word. The first word to rise to consciousness is “vast.” But some days even the state that I live in, the country I live in, feels suffocating. How can the universe be so vast and infinite while also feeling so constraining and enclosing? It’s ever-changing, fleeting like us. When defined, its identity, like ours, cannot ever be completely accurate.
It’s hard. Fluid identity, our social identity, is something we’d like to have control over. To be able to control how people see you, how they feel about you, it’d be almost like a superpower. Do it now, though. Quantify your existence and define yourself in one word. Are you artistic? Are you also kind? What are you leaving out? You have no words to combine the two. Can you really categorize yourself into one little box? Is this why you spend hours on Pinterest separating your aesthetics into ten different folders so you can play costume every day depending on what part of yourself you want to feel like? Or do you pick words that describe people and maybe even characters you want to be? Are you hot (but in the way that one Instagram model is because you want to look like her so bad)?
So, who am I? Under each jacket and sweater, behind each bootlace, who is the consistent “me?” Who knows. And who cares? Sure, everyone else is already taken, as Wilde says, but I’m quite an impressive conglomeration of people I want to be.
Identity is such a loose word. From a Fixed to a Fluid identity, to a desire to categorize oneself, it all feels so overwhelming, but at its core, it’s natural. Categorizing is “the brain’s tool to organize nearly everything we encounter,” writes scientists Sandra Reinert, Mark Hübener, Tobias Bonhoeffer, and Pieter M. Goltstein.2 And this organization of our world is done purely neurologically. Our categorization, or at least desire for categorization, is accomplished completely outside of our control. No wonder we have such a hard time describing ourselves. We are innately programmed to want to simplify the complex, to categorize the uncategorizable. But recognize that we can’t. Relieve yourself from the obsession to discern a perfectly structured identity. Why limit yourself when you could be so many things?
Wear any clothes. Don’t stress if you were inspired or just want to copy an outfit. Find yourself—your identity—within your closet, strewn about your room. Realize the reason you can’t pin down a specific aesthetic, why you want to be so many people, is because they’re all a part of you already.
1. Scheier, Mindy. “How Adaptive Clothing Empowers People with Disabilities.” Mindy Scheier: How Adaptive Clothing Empowers People with Disabilities | TED Talk, TED, 2018, https://www.ted.com/talks/mindy_scheier_how_adaptive_clothing_empowers_people_with_disabilities/transcript?language=en.
2. Reinert, Sandra, et al. “Simplifying Our World.” Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, 2022, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, 21 Apr. 2021, https://www.mpg.de/16747094/0416-psy-simplifying-our-world-155111-x#:~:text=Categorization%20is%20the%20brain's%20tool,and%20effectively%20to%20new%20experiences.
Strike Out,
Author: Seamus Curtin
Graphic Designer: Christine Jung
Editor: Hannah Hummel
Digital Design Director: Courtney Huang
Writing Director: Sidney Speicher
Editor in Chief: Aliya Hollub