What Is On The Inside Is What Matters.... Really?

Clothes. We rarely ever realize the impact that what we have on our bodies has on the people around us. If we thought about it, we would realize that our clothes are influential, persuasive, distracting. You can look at somebody and immediately determine what kind of person they are just by their clothing: or so we think. The thing is, we can't automatically assume that that boy who comes to class every day in sweatpants and, frighteningly enough, the same exact sweater he has been wearing all semester that he is a slob, a procrastinator who probably has a seriously low GPA. How do we know that that boy doesn't go home every night, perusing websites of random and various colleges, completing every assignment that he meticulously marked in his agenda. And what about the athletes of our school? A lot of the time, I run into a controversial thought: that the athletes must not be as smart as the rest of us, because that is what we were raised to believe. We saw it in the movies: the dumb bully jock who could barely spell but always had a date on his arm. If we really think about it, every time an athlete walks into a classroom with a monogrammed jacket on, do we think "Wow, what a brain. Maybe I should partner with him on our next project?" This might seem like a topic that has been done to death, but even though i have realized it before, I am only starting to think about it now.

Girls can dress provocatively and know that they will have more of an influence over men than they would if they wore a skirt down to their ankles, and a tight bun pinned to their scalp. The brands that are so familiar to us now have become so drilled into our head, the assumptions that follow them plaguing our thoughts about our peers. Who's to say that the girl in Hot Topic with the industrial piercing goes home every night, turns on goth music, and closes all the blinds? But we see groups of these people with dyed black hair and chipped gothic nails hanging out together and we assume that they are weird, lonely, unstable. But what if they simply like black? Or they wear the chained belt because it makes them happy, not reminds them of darkness? I know it seems awkward for me to bring up cliques and stereotypes in almost a negative way, but "what is inside is what matters" is all a bunch of crap.

OF COURSE who you are on the inside is what you should be judged on. OF COURSE it shouldn't matter what store you shop at or what car you drive. But doesn't it? Every single day, we are judged, and while judgments on our personalities are many, their number can not even compete with the judgment directed towards us because of the clothes on our back. Abercrombie, Urban Outfitters, Hot Topic, American Eagle, Target for God's Sake, and many many more clothing stores run rampant through our schools every single day. And every single thing we wear says something about us. The large, comfy, pull-over sweater I wore to school today? The weather is crappy, I am exhausted, and I couldn't care less. The black two inch strappy boots my neighbor in Spanish wore this morning? It was obvious she wanted to add a little sizzle to her outfit. This is not a bad thing at all: in fact, expressing individuality through things as simple and necessary as clothing is maybe one of the easiest ways to show people who you are. The problem I have with Clothes Profiling is when we look at our peer's clothes, turn our noses up at their style, and by extension, turn our noses up at them. Clothes are what we wear, and I do believe they are who we are. We choose what we put on our backs every morning, and how we want the world to see us. I just wish more people could look past what they don't like on the outside, and try to find something they do like on the inside.