Identity Crisis

Day 6 Theme: Identity

I've written on my wall journal, many times, the phrase: I don't even know who I am anymore. I used to have a very strong idea of self. Of who I was in comparison to others. The types of things I liked, the way I dressed, my beliefs. They all shaped this person that I was confident in being. And somewhere along the way of life that all got blurred. I think it's interesting to look at old photos of my life because I see the person I was and I don't identify. It's like my past self. I used to be that person. And sometimes I feel like that's not even tied up in who I am now. It's just gone. Most of the time we add on. We add layers and shift our thinking, and it just creates layers to a person over the years. I believe that's true as well. But when looking at who I used to be I just can't imagine thinking the way I used to think. How do we define ourselves? Am I placing my identity in healthy things?

Today we talked with an extraordinary individual named Lucy. She is a philosopher who teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Then we saw the FIT gallery, displaying Black Fashion Designer's works. Then we visited the Tenement museum and looked at what it would be like living in cramped urban immigrant housing. With a vibrant enthusiastic tour guide named Kathleen.

Lucy taught me a lot about fashion. I think we naturally assume that fashion is bad. That caring what we look like is superficial. She talked a lot about how Philosophy is seen as just the mind in many different points of view. Philosophers often think like they are just a floating head. Like our brain is the only thing which holds us. She likes to think of philosophy under the context that we are a mind inside a body, and a dressed body. We are dressed bodies. We see each other and we see the choices made of what clothes we wear. So fashion does matter. It's part of who we are. Lucy also talked about the ethics of fashion. There are so many issues that matter. Fast fashion and knock offs hurt the designers and essentially someone pays the cost. If you aren't paying the cost for what something is worth then someone somewhere is. Usually with sweat shops and tons of people not getting paid properly for the labor that went into making it. It's important to be conscious of where things come from. Spending money on used clothes can be a good thing but it's also okay to pay the full price for what something's worth in a store. And if it makes you happy then you might as well have a few nice clothes that you really enjoy instead of a lot that you don't need and don't care about. I've always been a fan of second hand shopping and just getting tons of cheap clothes, but she's right. Often I'll wear things that I'm not totally in love with. Or they're clothes that I know I'll need to replace soon. So moving forward I would like to invest more practically in clothes that I'll wear for longer and enjoy more. How do we become more conscious about where things come from? We keep talking about that in so many different aspects of life. It's important to know where your food comes from, your clothes, your technology, etc. That's how you become a more ethical consumer and not be detrimental to other human's livelihood. But it's so hard to do. It's so hard to be aware of everything. In some ways ignorance is bliss. I'd rather be in the know. I'd rather be aware than not. I think there's so much importance in gaining more knowledge, in new levels of enlightenment.

Lucy also talked about the gender issues in the fashion industry. Women are still being objectified in high fashion. We idealize one type of body. We want models to be hangers for the clothes, not bodies. She said that more and more men are also being objectified, in helps to make it less sexist. But it doesn't help, it just makes it worse. I asked her to elaborate on what we can do to make a change. How can we move fashion away from body issues and treating people as just bodies in aspects of gender? She said talk to me in ten years. That it's hard to know what we can do. It's hard to know if the industry is changing at all. I think that we can change it. I'm not sure how yet, but I think it starts with the advertising. The choices of who is up on a billboard. Everyone knows that almost everything is photoshopped and fake that's on ads, but it still impacts an individual. Even if you know the woman on the make up commercial doesn't look like that it still settles deep down inside that you should look like that. We've created unrealistic expectations for society. We've built an empire on a lie. I honestly don't know what to do about it. But I'm determined to do something.

After visiting the Tenement museum we heard just at the tale end of the tour from Kathleen about how being a tour guide has impacted her. She said that it fosters empathy to explore the past. That we romanticize history, but it becomes real once you explore how these people immigrated to this country and had to live. You realize they're real people and they have had these incredible hard lives. Immigration affects where we came from and it affects who we are. My past plays a role in who I am today. I feel like I grew up partially in Japanese culture. Even though I don't look Japanese and my parents aren't Japanese. And people never expect me to know things about Japan or appreciate Japanese food. It's just a small look into what others who really do feel torn between two cultures experience all the time.