the art of personal adornment
o b j e c t i v e
- investigate how physical appearance affects definitions of identity and belonging
a r t i f a c t
My appearance has changed dramatically over the years as I have experimented with different styles/looks and the resulting influence it has had on the way the world interacts with me. More often than not, though greatly diversified in terms of representation of look, the quality of look has mostly been the same: counter-culture. This was not always, however, the case.
Growing up I maintained a fairly conventional appearance for a teenage boy located in rural Oregon: short hair, long shorts/appropriately baggy pants (as was the fashion at the time), unadorned by piercings or tattoos — overall fairly generic and nondescript. Not because my family was particularly conservative (or at all). My parents met in Africa during the peace corps and were always supportive of any decisions my siblings or I made about our identities. The whole “rules of society” thing never really existed in my house growing up, but I’m getting side-tracked. Despite an overall conventional appearance, this still didn’t prevent folks from recognizing there was something a little different about me. I don’t really fit into conventional gender roles and never have. Intellectually impoverished areas like rural Oregon tend to interpret this one way: “he’s a homosexual.” (It might be worth noting that I define my own sexuality more fluidly than that, and have been sexually active with folks who present as both female and male.) Needless to say I experienced a lot of marginalization growing up and general exclusion/mistreatment.
I think in a lot of ways this influenced my immediate decision to alter my appearance to that of a somewhat less conventional manner. If externally presenting myself as “normal,” “traditional,” “conventional,” — whatever — didn’t allow me to fit in, then why would I bother to do it? If I was going to be marginalized, it was going to be on my terms. So I let my hair grow out enough to start spiking up in a mohawk fashion and pierced my lip. (Gasp!) Something blatantly defining as “gay” in the community I grew up in.
What followed was interesting. Once I began asserting myself visually, people stopped feeling the need to define me and just sort of backed away — they seemed somewhat uneasy around me. Somehow, overnight (well, as long as it took to enact these changes to my appearance) the power structure had been subverted. I remember feeling in control of how people reacted to me, which informed future decisions about my personal customization: if I press button ‘x’ it will elicit response ‘y.’ As I said, interesting. I began to revere my own appearance less as a statement about me, and more about those who interacted with me — and how they chose to go about doing so.
As time went on I added more and more piercings to my body, my clothes got tighter/more revealing, my hair more defiantly hawked, and began to present an overall more sexually provocative image — bordering almost on the feminine.
Currently I’m in the long-haired, bohemian, 60s/70s sun-child stage of presentation, bordering very adjacently the look of homelessness: scruff, unkempt and wild hair, short (by modern standards for men, but still longer than anything completely accepted for women) cut-off shorts, sandals, and a lot of sunglasses — A LOT.
I have my own graphic design business and work full-time managing a local print shop while attending school full-time on top of that. I’ve been vegan for the past six-years and have recently started trying to grow more and more of my own food, and prepare the majority of my meals at home. I also run 8-12 miles a day, train for marathons, and am extremely goal-oriented. It keeps me very busy. I’m very responsible. Though it’s interesting how often people look at me, based on my appearance, and assume things like I have “weed to sell” or know where to score some heroine. On one occasion I was even stopped by a security guard and checked for “track marks” on my arms and asked to empty my pockets. Of course there was nothing to be found because I don’t engage in such behaviors, but I’m very aware of how I present to the world around me. In that sense, I don’t know that my appearance defines my values, not in the typical or expected way, anyway. I’m not a drug addict, I have my own place, and work very hard. If my appearance were to speak to my values in any way, it would be a rejection of conventional perceptions — an attempt to serve as a mirror for those who would otherwise tell me who I am. There’s nothing more illuminating about a person than the judgments they project onto an external entity. That has always been the driving force behind the choices I make regarding my personal aesthetic: I’m going to reveal you for what you are by way of letting you reveal yourself. I don’t know if that’s a value or result of marginalization as a child?
Regarding my peer community, I don’t spend time with a single type of person — and all of my friends, however varied, have a lot more humanity in common with each other than objectifications about appearance might reduce them to. As I stated in my discussion post, I’m really uncomfortable with this topic at large because I know, from my own personal experience, and having been alive long enough and experienced enough people to know that external presentations are incredibly superficial, and in terms of what’s really important, not even skin deep. You might be able to extrapolate approximations about a person’s attitudes or beliefs, but more often than not I suspect you’d be wrong — and wouldn’t really access what’s infinitely more important: is this an interesting person? Do they have exciting thoughts/and ideas? Are they engaging? Are they kind?
r e f l e c t i o n + f u t u r e g o a l s
This unit was pretty enthralling — the shear length of my artifact should speak to that if not the content itself. I feel like I’ve been studying this concept the majority of my life: how and why do people “judge a book by its cover” and what it reveals about them — what external, aesthetic choices indicate about the psychology and subconscious of an individual. It’s really fascinating the way folks assign certain identities to certain visual packages. Humans are so determined to classify and distinguish everything — pattern seeking, categorizing creatures that they are.
This unit really forced me to reflect on my evolution as a person and the subsequent evolution of my personal aesthetic. I’ve always known why I made the decisions regarding my appearance that I had, but it’s another thing to put it all down on paper — to articulate it in an organized fashion. It makes me very curious about the future of my look and what kind of a catalogue of human response I will have acquired by the end of my life.
I probably struggled the most with this particular unit. I am really uncomfortable making value judgments about other folks based on their physical appearance. As described in my unit response, I know the information it might reveal to be inaccurate and unimportant at best.
Regarding the future, I’d like to continue to mitigate the amount of external judgments and projected values I allow in my life. It feels really disgusting and somewhat spiritually incomplete.