Enhancing our identity-deprived lives

It was hard work remaining as vigorously original as the downtown cultural clique demanded, let alone making my way around Manhattan in those costumes. The few garments surviving those odd decades bear a definitive tribute to the immense effort it took.

With luck and a degree of self-awareness uncoupled from seasonal market pressures, a woman’s personal style has the exquisite evolutionary advantage of ripening beautifully with age. Gore Vidal’s view that, “style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn,” becomes less of a challenge and more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But for younger New York women, the power of cultural trends, as opposed to the development and possession of personal style, has become if anything, even more brutal. According to the New York Times, many young females now aspire to a bi-coastal image, dressing in summer clothes during the chillier months, imitating “images of demi-clad stars pushing strollers and sipping lattes” in “E! Entertainment and celebrity magazines”.

But let us not condemn those wretched uptight souls who no longer know themselves well enough to put on a jumper when it’s freezing outside. Consumer marketing’s vicious grip on the shape of contemporary imagination has changed the way many people exist without their noticing. Beneath this year’s skimpy winter dresses lies last year’s tummy ring, and the year before’s toe tattoo.

Indeed, to define themselves, 25 years after my generations’ subversive self-styling became tacitly absorbed into the marketplace’s vastly increased menu of options, many seek what may be considered to be far more extreme alternatives to mainstream conventions.

Piercings, ritual scarring, tattooing and other forms of semi-permanent body decoration have become fairly commonplace among young westerners as a mode of self-definition, displaying the appearance of a deeper level of personal risk and experience. Once the exclusive territory of tough guys, inmates and sailors, tattoos especially have now made the transition into mainstream acceptability, albeit with parental permission requirements.

Still, in many instances, the impetus to pierce and puncture quite often literalises an individual’s paradoxical desire for inclusion and rejection of a range of well-defined social orders. But content is everything, as publishers say, so even in body art, last year’s serpent may soon be superceded by this year’s dragon.

While there are many insightful sociological and anthropological treatises on these well-established phenomena, my current interest lies more particularly in the cultural realm of idealised tribalism, at the expense of awareness of tribal realities in today’s world. National Geographic, that long established barometer of mainstream culture’s armchair-bound ethnographic consciousness, now offers an online Authentic Shopping Guide, leading readers to well, “genuine”, as opposed to fake, local craftspeople in far-flung regions. The concept is so politically correct and so anthropologically hygienic it literally smirks with the satisfaction of a Fifth Avenue department store sale purchase.

Whether or not the international travel and fashion industry chooses turquoise and amber beading, or handcrafted leather fringing teamed with shredded silk as next seasons’ must-have look, is secondary to the personal impetuous to assume, often at relatively high personal costs, a visual affinity with distant, unfamiliar and culturally uprooted disjunctive tribal imagery.

Again, let us not judge those whose misguided nose rings, Japanese Manga-styled tattoos and weighty hand-made silver jewellery have already felled them with the speed of a retro bullet.

What is of far more interest is how the legend of the acquisition of authenticity is lived and told without the experiential context of having visited those teeming smelly bazaars, crowded melees or winding lanes lined with open drains to find that perfect goat skin pouch, choker of chewed pearls or crushed gold threaded sari-fabric knickers.

Where do westerner’s shopping expeditions for “authentic” artifacts and outfits to enhance identity-deprived lives, fit against the perilous existences of those who made these items in the first place? Or, to put in another way, why has there been so little value adding to consumer consciousness of tribal conditions, in spite of the entrenched trend of acquiring cultural legitimacy through purchasing ethnic goods?