We are what we eat. Not because of the biology of metabolism in which the foods that we eat are transformed into the tissues of our bodies but because every time we choose one food - or one soft drink - over another, we make a statement about identity, about who we are or (perhaps even more importantly) who we would like to be. This is just as true within the arena of fashion, for clothes make the man and woman (and boy and girl and infant).This paper explores the ways in which our fashion choices are also choices of personal identity adding up - if we are lucky - to something like a measure of personal integration.
This field is a broad one - affecting the lives of nearly everyone in the world at all times - and so is almost impossible to address in its entirety. However, we may understand the whole by looking at a part of it, using one set of fashion choices as a metonym for the entire process by which we attempt to integrate who we are by what we buy. Thus this paper focuses on the company Vans, one of those fashion marks that its wearers have turned into a central marker of their identity, their sense of being in the world.
In the arena of youth fashion in which Vans operates, producing shoes as well a clothes for the segment of the youth market that associates itself with skateboarding, being the "in" label is the most important thing. It is the most important thing for the company but it is also the most important thing for those who wear Vans products.
There is actually relatively little that a company can do to guarantee this "in" status: Such a designation as being in is made by the young men (and some very few young women) who identify with this brand. It is consumers who make a company's products "cool" - even as (of course) they are engaging as advertisement for that company.
We should remember in analyzing the ways in which a group of consumers' sense of identity has become linked to the products of a particula...