Fashion and Personal Identity - Essay Example

Fashion and Personal Identity In daily interactions, people’s outer appearance serves as a significant site of identity performance. People use their bodies to convey who they are and project information about themselves. Clothes are one of the things people use to prove their identity. However, clothes come in different fashions and the fashion in clothing is a vital aspect for one to portray his or her culture and identity. However, other people may wrongly interpret the fashion of an individual and objectify the individual. People tend to judge social related situations by using background cues from the surrounding environment. In addition, fashion is an important aspect that differentiates gender different identities of different people in the society. The following are identities realizable from the fashion of an individual. Currently, fashion has taken the wave in people’s dressing and unlike in history where there was no much fashion (Bennett 98). Fashion is one of the ways that describes people’s identity. Current fashion depicts women as sexual objects in the society. The problem arising from fashion starts right from the clothes’ producing companies such as Gucci, which is a popular high fashion brand. The company’s advertisements mainly focus women selling the products. In most cases, the women in the advertisements are either surrounded by many men or half-naked. For example, in the photograph above used by Gucci Company for advertising, the product occupies about 15 percent of the picture. In the advert, the company is selling Gucci Guilty’s fragrance. To make matters worse, the topless woman being kissed and caressed by the man is the most attention grabbing. At the same time as the woman is being caressed and kissed by the man, she looks towards the viewer in a seductive manner. The lips of the woman in the picture are painted bright red, which is known to be sexy. In addition, the woman puts her arm around the neck of the man. The entire picture centers on the intimate pose of the man and woman. These kinds of advertisements draw huge attention because they show the woman in a sexual manner. However, to market the product effectively, it would be better if the woman held the perfume bottle or do something attracting attention to the perfume and not to her body or herself only. Calvin Klein Clothing Line is another company whose advertisement for male jeans try to persuade the customers to purchase from their clothing line because their jeans trousers could boost sex of the man wearing it. The advertisement convinces male buyers that wearing jeans from Calvin Klein, they will look sexy and wanted by attractive women. The advertisement incorporates sex in its advertisements but still present women as sex objects. The picture tries to prove that when a man wears a Calvin Klein Jeans, he is in a position to get a woman like the one in the picture above. From the above photographs, it is clear that most clothing lines apply sex appeal to sell their perfumes, clothing, and alcohol. The main issue is that the fashion companies portray women as sex objects and men as the sex subjects in their advertisements. On the other hand, the customers purchase the items with a mind of making women their sex objects. Today’s fashion is quite disturbing because it is hard to differentiate between adults and minors. Some companies as advertising agents use the minor females. During their work, they are supposed to look sexually appealing to the viewers. This kind of practice has put young female children belonging to the minority age at a threat because they are seen as sex objects and not young children. The entire society has a challenge to differentiate between the young and adult females due to the current contradicting fashions. In most cases, fashions based firms use young models in their advertisements and as usual, sex and sexual appeal sells. Many women copy their role models in fashion and end up objectifying all women whether young or old. Currently, there are clothes for men and women. Unlike in the old ages where men dressed in robes and women in dresses, things have taken other dimensions. Today women can wear trousers just like men, short skirts, dresses, and shorts above knees and revealing thighs. The clothing lines whose aim is to use sex as a selling strategy for their products bring about all these changes. Time back, women’s clothes were decent but today the clothes are meant to bring out the sexual attractiveness of the women. In response to the current mode of dressing, women have objectified themselves to sexual objects because most dress in a manner that attracts men and satisfies their sexual pleasures. The current fashion for women objectifies them as sexual objects because they are very exposing. (Weber 33). Revealing and Concealing Identities In the modern context, there are clothes that are revealing and others are concealing the individual’s identity. Most people in the cities dress to impress others. For example, most young women dress in fashionable revealing clothes to reveal their bodies, probably sexy bodies to the men. These types of dressing reveal women as sex objects. Trending fashions today make women sexual objects because they tend to expose sexual parts of the women to attract men to the brands and the women too. The clothes make it hard to identify the woman in other intellectual values. (Abbott, Claire and Mellissa 344). In another perspective, some fashions adopted by some young people are a proof of their self-value and self worth. For example, women practicing prostitution tend to dress in extremely revealing clothes to reveal their work. They dress in such clothes to make it easy for their customers to spot them easily. Such type of dressing is different from the normal dressing types. Simple clothes tend to conceal the identity of a person because they do not attract much attention from the society. Therefore, whatever one wears is likely to conceal or reveal the identity of an individual. For example, expensive clothes, jewelry, and shoes reveal the economic status of an individual. Religion clothes reveal the religious identity of the person such as the Muslims. The dressing of a person has the ability to reveal the character of the person. People who are careless in their dressing are likely to be very careless persons in life. A dirty person in outer appearance is dirty in every other aspect. Indecent dressing of the woman depicts them as sexual objects. Women acting as images of brands, media houses and other capitalism views have dressing styles meant to attract men sexually. As far as these women have their own personality, the men view them as sexual objectives due to the fashion they use in their styles of dressing. Current fashion for women portrays women as sex objects. The clothes reveal a lot of sensitive parts of the women’s bodies. In advertising, women are used to attract more viewers especially the male gender (Saad 145). Men are attracted to sight of the parts of the women’s body parts. In music videos, women wear revealing clothes while men dress smartly and decently. All these practices put the women at a vulnerable position of sex objects in the society. Same case applies to media personalities who are used to attract men to view the mediums of media such as television stations. Men are taken as whole while women are the objects. In fact, men are the sexual subjects. The society has made it a norm that men have higher sex power (Jackson and Sue 25). Today, every woman must dress in a manner that men appreciate sexually and feel satisfied, as they prefer sexy women. These fashion trends result from the clothing lines and everybody is meant to dress as per the current fashion. The men after the fashion appreciate every woman. The fashion today is a clear identification of women as sex objects in that not unless a woman dresses to attract men, there is no huge impact in what she does. Therefore, as much as the women would like to dress decently, they are forced to dress like sex objects to impress men who have dominated most positions in all industries (Zoonen 13). Sexuality is related to feminism and the society operates as per the relations people have for their survival. It is by the manner people view a particular activity that makes them who they are. Objectification of people involves lowering of a person’s humanity to an object and for females; it is based on their sexual attributes of attractiveness. In the situation, the women are judged according to their attractiveness sexually instead of values such as intellectual ability. As stated earlier on, sexual objectification for women is in news, media, and advertising. Most companies today targeting the males in the market make use of sexually attractive women and expose a few of the selected body features to use in the advertisements. The strategy of using sexually attractive women in the advertisements is meant to attract men who value women as sex objects. The males are supposed to experience pleasure and appear as the subjects sexually. In response, men respond to the advertisements positively and the company in question makes revenue from its strategy. Most corporate and companies have lowered the value of women to objects applicable for selling their products and services. The current trend of fashion has contributed greatly to sexual objectification of women because it tends to expose sensitive body parts f women (Croteau and Williams 25). In movies, most female characters used have no main goal in the plot but are used to demonstrate the male characters as the heroes, strong and sexual. In most televisions, they use the female anchors dressed in sexually fitting clothes to attract male viewers who keep their gaze on the woman. Women are used in strip clubs, brothels, and pornographic materials. To an extent, the manner in which women are portrayed in most cases have led to many issues such as rape and stripping of women publicly. The current fashion aims at attracting men to the women. Women are raped because men feel that there is no great concern for the feelings of the women and their experiences and they should honor the sexual interests of the men. The men have denied women subjectivity is sexual matters. The idea in sexual objectification of women is to satisfy the sexual pleasure that she is capable of producing in the mind of men. The issue has a significant impact in the society because the role of women and their worth in the society has been reduced (Jackson and Sue 15). The current fashion and the mode of advertising adopted by most fashion companies are the major reasons as to why women are considered sexual objects in the global society. The current trends of fashion expose women’s sexual parts posing men as sex objects. Companies use sex appeal of women as sex objects and men as the sex subjects. The manner in which movies, media, and companies make use of women is in a suggestive manner that women are sex objects. The women’s body parts are exposed badly. Companies use sexual appeal of the women as a method of selling their products and the women are under the control of the men. In conclusion, current fashion identifies women largely as sex objects. On the extreme side, some fashion based companies use young girls in their advertisements and make them look sexy as young as they are and this poses danger to the young girls in the community. Rape cases are high today because men have taken made all sexy looking women as sex objects. Today, men view young girls as sexy and end up exploiting them. Of course, the young girls would like to associate with a certain brand to look sexy not knowing that they are sexually objectifying themselves to the men in the society. Bibliography Abbott, Pamela, Claire Wallace, and Melissa Tyler. An Introduction to Sociology: Feminist Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Andersen, Margaret L, and Collins P. Hill. Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth, 1995. Print. Bennett, Andy. Culture and Everyday Life. London: SAGE, 2005. Internet resource Coombs, Danielle S, and Bob Batchelor. We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life and Always Has. , 2014. 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