Artifact IV: Personal Adornment
Topic: Art of Personal Adornment
Learning Unit Objectives:
- Evaluate personal values and paradigms around body decoration and physical beauty.
- Investigate how physical appearance affects definitions of identity and belonging.
- Analyze values and belief systems of physical appearance across cultures, sub-cultures and generations.
Artifact: Personal Adornment Reflection
“Dressing is a way of life” said by Yves Saint Laurent–a famous clothes designer. This quote is my perspective of dressing. The way I dressed changed overtime greatly but there is a common feeling- trendy and comfortable. I remember when I was young, my mother always arrange my daily clothes because she has operated clothing business a several years ago and she know the trendy of each seasonal clothes. At that time, I am a little proud of my dressing because I always dressed the fashionable clothes before my peers do. However, basically, I do not have chance to decorate by myself, when I was in the middle school, I began to choose my cloth by myself. Owing to my mother always decorate me as a good and cute girl, I start to choose the opposite cloth style. For instance, I feel it is cool and more freedom to wear some sports or jeans like a boy. But my dressing style do not supported by my parents, because they still believe I should wear a beautiful dress and behave to be a girl. At the beginning, I do not agree with them, and some strange clothes always attract my eyes. But I feel not very comfortable when I wear them because the quality is not very comfortable and the strange design is not convenient for me to study like a oversized tee with no arms and just cover my body like a traditional Chinese rice-pudding. Gradually, I understand my parents’ words, and I change my strange style to a casual and comfortable style until now which also gets my parents’ support such as a simple white tee and a skirt or a pair of jeans. Through this change, I realized my families always do some good to me and I feel more confident when I take time to choose and prepare the daily life’s dressing.
Besides, dressing has a strong influence on my emotions since I like the casual cloth style. For instance, dressing light color clothes always can keep me calm and confident, and wearing some tight with dark color always make me feel a little uncomfortable and impatient. Otherwise, I always like to wear a necklace and a bracelet, which both have a jade. These stuffs are from my grandparents because they are Buddhist and believe the jade can bring me lucky and health. The core values in my family would be self-expression and comfortable. My grandparents both like to wear the classic casual style—my grandpa likes to wear Chinese tunic suit and my grandma would like to choose some knee-length skirt because they are very traditional and their dressing style should be formality and conservativeness. And my parents would like to wear suits in the daily life because they are both running their business and the suits stands for their decency, leadership, formality and maturity. I like their styles, because they have their own believes about dressing styles and insist for a long time no matter what other people do. I do believe my dressing and body adornment can express my personality and beliefs. I do not have tattoos and any kind of ear holes. The main factor to choose my daily clothes is to express my feelings and reflect my personal values. In addition, my parental guidance influences my choice of dressing greatly and I choose respect and tradition through my dressing, besides, I like the casual style, and perhaps in the future, I want to be a professional business woman like my mom with a formal suits. Although I still like to wear fashionable clothes like my peers, it is not conflict to pursue a healthy and freedom dressing style. As I grew up, my peers often influence me the dressing choice, they will suggest me some new dressing trends. For example, there are many students in Oregon would like to wear sports brands like Nike shoes, t-shirt and North face rain jackets. I gradually adopted this new culture in Eugene and consume many Nike clothes, shoes and also wear the North Face rain jackets. I cannot ignore my peers have a strong influence on my dressing style and help me to adapt different and new cultures. Going along with time, independence become my core beliefs and values like my peer community, because this perhaps is the first time (include myself) to study abroad and choose dress how we want and present what person we want to be. Currently, I feel good to customize myself in a trendy, comfortable and healthy way. Lastly, I know dressing is just appearance and normally cannot reflect the truly self-expression, but I believe we can become better and more confident if we insist our beliefs and fulfill our inside through knowledge like my parents.
Reflection:
This assignment give me a chance to go back to see not only why I wear particular style of clothing, but how my style has changed over time based on the experiences I have had. By doing this, I was also able to see how my physical appearance connects with my values and the values of my family and peers. What I noticed is that people dress similar to the culture or community in which they were raised.
For example, in the below picture, I love to dying my hair, painting my nails and prefer to wear some designer dress or some special shape of glasses to show I am confident and independent because I was surrounding lots of friends who are in favor of trendy clothes or models at that time. After as a member of University of Oregon, I changed my particular parts of my wardrobe as the right picture. I like to wear some cute and sports style clothes because I want to reveal to others my belonging or identity. Now as an undergraduate in the Lundquist Business School, there are many presentation classes allowed me to dress more formal, and I have had to mold my style to more business type. From this artifact, I also realized how much I enjoy expressing myself through my dressing style.
Learning Goals for the Future:
I believe is important for everyone to reflect upon this topic because it can help you to understand more about yourself, especially for young people include me. As I continue to grow and my personal values will change and develop, I will continue to pay some attention on analyze my own values and identity in terms of adornment. Then I will try to know more about others’ thoughts through their dressing.
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