your structure.

Most people dress the part, but cannot play the part. It's easier to alter your surface structure than to change the structure of a deeper sentiment such as your personality traits. Does fashion offer an accurate representation of personality traits?

Fashion is a form of hyper representation that attempts to express the self. Along with this, it leads to a type of hyper judgment. Obviously, as social groups grew in complexity, it became increasingly difficult to know everyone on a deeper level. One of the bases upon which fashion emerged was perhaps through the need to facilitate a quick route towards finding shared characteristics and common interests among a growing number of individuals. When you step onto the subway your attention is focused on iconic stimuli such as symbols, logos, etc. Unless you engage in conversation with a stranger, the only other way to gain some type of impression of them is through how they represent themselves in an aesthetic sense.

We are increasingly becoming a culture that is 'brand' obsessed. I often find scribbles in my own notes that express things such as 'find your brand', 'make yourself into a product' -- because this is how people are taught to consume and process others. We are becoming highly dependent on representing ourselves as brands.

Do we sacrifice originality for acceptance? Or is there some type of functionality to brands we embody? UGG's -- do these straddle the side of function more than form? Who creates the semantic meaning of this brand? When we see others wearing similar brands, there is a sense of unconscious calm and safety via familiarity and identification. We might go as far to say that we share reasons for wearing the same brands. If we believe these to be sound reasons, then we project that same reasoning onto others we perceive embodying them.

Conformists don't move -- they stay safe. The outliers or 'freaks' risk exclusion at the price of having a more developed sense of individuality.
Most of us aren't who we appear to be -- fashion is just an extension of our dreams, expectations, and wishes. I recall that certain groups are represented through the colours of their shoelaces -- with considerable overlap. There is ambiguity on this level for not everyone wearing green shoelaces knows that they could represent environmentalist attitudes. Perhaps these shoelaces could also represent people who love unripened banana's!

I often think about how I represent myself and whether or not I do a sound job of it. What I conclude is that through the emergence of social complexity the need for fashion to express the self grew. It's taxing on the brain to be able to memorize so many human-like features of a nude body and rely on faces alone (visually speaking). The addition of this fashion 'surface structure' will continue to emerge and take on new forms as social complexity grows even deeper requiring even further disambiguation.