PRETENSE
There seems to be more pretending in the manner in which we dress today than in any other aspect of our living.
We all do some extent, of course, live portions of our lives in emulation of the actions of others. That can be both good and bad, if you reflect upon it just a moment, based on a attempt to replicate the conduct of the saints - both great and small - who have gone before us.
We have a basic inclination, it seems, which leads us to follow the example of others, and we may not have a clear picture of what makes up the true and total personality of the the individual, or group. We are modeling after at that point our lives when we decide to follow a path set by others. The "saint" we select might be, in truth, far from deserving such a designation. He or she, in their time and place, may have been far from what we think it to have been.
When someone asked singer Tony Bennett how he could become famous again-and-again, he is reported to have said: ”I think I can become famous all over again, because I wear a tie. You have got to be different!.”
Dress is perhaps the most obvious area of pretense in our present era. Very often we blame freakish clothing styles, hairdos and habits on "the advertising world", but they, in turn, blame it on Hollywood which sets our standards far more than we realize. Other break it down to TV and other factional features of our entertainment world. We seem to find it easy to forget that much of the “pop” world today is a one of fantasy and make-believe and, start wearing the most freakish hairstyle we can find, or revert to an ancient one because some star or the big or little screen has had one as a part of a particular role he or she played. It is not only the young people who make a habit of appearing sloppily dressed. Adults, too, go out of their way to do so to attract attention with strange hair configurations, off colors in hair and every item of clothing they might choose to don.
It could be said we are living in a time of "disreputable" dress. When trouble surfaces in our schools, someone is sure to attribute it to kids wearing expensive designer jeans and exotic shoes and slovenly crowds of them shuffling through crowded corridors, many of them lugging gigantic backpacks filled with a week's supply of who-knows-what. The boys and many girls wear extremes - ultra loose pants dragging the ground and over sized sweat shirts and ragged looking canvas/plastic footwear - or skin tight jeans or shorts. Just about every such TV film segment features a dozen or so super-skinny girls wearing min-short shorts and tight tops. Viewers ares usually subjected to at least one low angle crotch shot in ever such sequence which packs a visual comment on sex problems in the schools.
We dress as others do and have become one, big, non-descript blob of nothingness. Everyone is trying to look like everyone else. Individual traits are discouraged.
A.L..M October 7, 2003 [c514Wds]
