I’m not sure who first came up with the idea of promoting clothing emblazoned with the company’s own name as the ultimate expression of cool, but whoever it was deserves a marketer-of-the-century award. I mean, really. Getting customers to pay for the honor of advertising for you is even better than Tom Sawyer’s fence-painting scheme. And yet, millions of people happily agree to do it, every single day.
I’m also pretty sure that nobody brandishing a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt sees it that way. Wearing a labeled T-shirt is a way of making an identity statement. It proclaims to the world: “I feel affinity with the Tommy Hilfiger brand. I am cool, just like their models, and that lifestyle is one I aspire to.” Or to put it succinctly: “I am a Tommy Hilfiger kind of person.”
In truth, how we dress almost always says something about who we are, even if it’s just that we don’t care overmuch how we dress. But for people who feel as if their identities aren’t readily accepted and supported by the world around them, identity statements can feel much more important. Years ago, when I moved from California to the Midwest, I remember feeling as if I was suddenly under attack by an avalanche of restrictive, ultra-traditional gender and social standards and expectations. Normally, I’m a fan of classic-styles clothes, because that means I don’t have to shop for new ones very often. I’m also not inherently a Bohemian counter-culture kind of person. But in that Midwest town, where women were still judged by the quality of their homemade mashed potatoes, I suddenly felt an intense desire to start wearing tie-dyed hippie clothes as a kind of armor, both to proclaim my difference and to protect against having my voice and identity swallowed whole by the stifling conventions around me.
It’s the same reason that identity-statement clothing—along with particular hairstyles, body art, jewelry, or any other symbol visible to the world—tends to be important to young people. It acts as both a reinforcement of deeply felt individual difference, as well as an act of defiance against perceived family, peer, societal, or other external pressures to be someone other than who they feel they really are. In a developmental stage where the main task is figuring out who we really are, many of us feel a need to scream that we are different from the cookie-cutter mold we see around us.
At the same time, claiming or wearing an identity-statement label gives us another element we long for, especially if we don’t easily “fit” with the traditional culture or expectations around us: a sense of belonging. It lets us simultaneously proclaim our difference from one set of expectations, while announcing and gaining membership in another group for which we feel more affinity.
All of which is well and good, and 100% understandable. But as appealing and powerful as identity labels are, they are also a double-edged sword—for a couple of reasons. The first is that the louder we proclaim our membership in one particular group, the greater the chance that we may turn away people who might have many other things in common with us, and who might prove to be valuable friends or connections, but who don’t or can’t get past the label we’ve blazoned on our chest. Walking into a bar in New York City wearing a Boston Red Sox hat, shirt, and jacket, for example, almost guarantees a cool reception. If, on the other hand, it happens to come out that you’re a Red Sox fan after you’ve connected with a New Yorker on other points, they’re far more likely to take it in stride.
The second downside to identity labels is the impact they have on how others view us, or even how we view ourselves. My college roommate and I used to talk about how much we hated the icebreaking question, “Finish the sentence: ‘I am ….’” We knew the point was to add descriptors that would tell people how we saw ourselves. Roles, like “a student,” or adjectival attributes, like “smart” or “kind.” But she and I also recognized that in proclaiming or labeling some part of who we were, we were limiting how people would see us; focusing people overmuch on some small part of our identity, instead of making them see us as the irreducible, complex, multi-faceted, and ever-changing human beings we knew we were. We also recognized that, in the process, we would be limiting how we saw ourselves, by sheer nature of which factors we highlighted and emphasized, and all the other possibilities we were eliminating with each and every definition. Every time you insist on defining something, you exclude a whole world of things it isn’t. And there’s no way around that.
Labels, in other words, are at once both power and prison.
It’s a point worth thinking about, in the midst of heightened insistence on the part of many individuals to define precise descriptors for who they are in terms of sexuality, gender, and a hundred other potential categories of identity.
Believe me, I get it. I spent the better part of 30 years fighting for respect as a woman in the ultra-male-dominated industry and world of aviation; fighting infuriatingly entrenched and traditional definitions of what that label of “woman” meant I was, could do or be good at, or how I ought to be behaving. When I started doing aviation writing, my editors still insisted that the only acceptable pronoun for “pilot” was male, so I consciously crafted my sentences with plural nouns, so I could use the more vague “they.” Fortunately, grammar rules finally caught up with the latter 20th century, and now it’s standard to use “they” even with singular nouns like “pilot.”
What we do about frustrations like that is something each of us has to decide for ourselves. We can, as many people now do, insist on carving out some new and specific descriptor that feels more “right” to us. But again, labels are a double edged sword, and we might want to be careful what we wish for. If we insist that people only address us or view us or refer to us in a very specific way, we also ensure that whatever label we put on ourselves is the biggest thing they will pay attention to about us. It may even focus their attention so much on that particular descriptor that they miss all the other nuances that make us an interesting, irreplaceable, irreducible human being. And the combination of those two may prevent us building or discovering bridges with other humans who might prove fun, valuable, or world-expanding for us to connect with. It’s hard to relax enough to connect authentically with someone you don’t know all that well when you feel a walking-on-eggshells-offense-avoiding need to focus, instead, on the specific terms and words and labels you have to use around them.
Language and labels can also be easy substitutes for actual acceptance, action or change. The late, great David Foster Wallace wrote a terrific essay in Harper’s about how the focus on correct labels and language can allow people feel righteous without requiring them to actually do anything, including the difficult work of effecting real social or systemic change. Lip service, as it were. He makes a good point.
My college roommate and I both took a different tack. Both of us, I think, spent very little time worrying about how people referred to or categorized us, and focused more on how they actually treated us. If we’d had to state a goal, I think it would have been to get people to expand their ideas about how they viewed categories like “woman.” What that could consist of … including a range of possibilities in terms of where a woman could sit on the spectrum between feminine and masculine, what her sexual orientation or identity might be, and everything else that she might be or do or be capable of. I think we wanted to get the world to spend less time thinking about labels entirely, and more on the unique layers and nuances that comprised the endlessly complex human beings we were, and all we were doing in the world. We didn’t want to redefine what labels people used with regard to us. We wanted to get past them altogether.
Labels, after all, are tricky things. For all the sense of belonging or difference or space they may give us from the conformist pressures we feel, they are still prisons of their own. Which is why my roommate and I finally decided that the only good way to answer that ice-breaking question about how we labeled or defined ourselves was, in effect, to refuse to answer it at all: to answer, simply, “I AM.”
