Enhancing our identity-deprived lives

Discussing style, adornment and questions of conformity is a tantalising invitation to outright sedition in On Line Opinion, a website peopled and read by some of the most vociferously opinionated, conscionable, demanding thinkers in this nation. Given the focused scope and intensity of debate, examining fashion’s ideological supremacy and superfluity on these pages is potentially treasonable, but perhaps I am ready to make one or two more enemies in the online community for the sake of presenting a woman’s side of the argument.

Besides, the question of why we conform (or rebel) and why many westerners adopt tribal forms of ornamentation is especially intriguing to me as I’m currently based in India, a nation of nations, assembling some of the most decorative cultures on the face of the earth.

For the first time since leaving London for Hobart six years ago, I’m forced to dress up for work. Much as I love Tasmania, it stubbornly remains one of the last style-free bastions of anti-consumerism in the western hemisphere. Living there means that a dozen of so pairs of expensive high heels and as many sharp outfits, carefully acquired as an indispensable part of my professional identity working abroad, have had remarkably few outings since I returned.

In contrast, in Delhi where I’m based at Tehelka, a progressive independent weekly newspaper edited by some of this country’s savviest women (and men), the pressure is on. Six days a week I must find something decent to wear and to pull it off (or rather on) with a sufficient degree of personal dignity required for peaceful co-existence with my adopted foreign culture.

It means getting in and out of auto rickshaws without catching my trailing dupta scarf and being choked to death, and enduring the daily onslaught of this country’s urban mud, dust, manure and flying beetle nut (paan) juices without getting splattered or stained. Female modesty is a recurrent theme in Indian life, but so too is co-ordination, colour, grooming and decoration, and I have happily risen to this new sartorial challenge albeit with some trepidation. It’s damned hot for a start, so staying cool is a necessity, but so is covering up one’s shoulders, legs and cleavage.

Fortunately, given the need for frequent breaks from the stressful pace of this hard-hitting weekly, fashion chat is recurrent in an office full of Indian men and women who pay compliments and constantly inquire of one another’s style choices.

Somehow, a scope that seemed fiercely restrictive to me a few months ago, now feels almost limitless. Why is this? Never one to readily accept conventional boundaries, as a foreigner here in India, I’ve willingly submitted to local dress codes. Call me susceptible, but I’m certain that an essential part of a woman’s intuitive survival is closely related to our internal self-possession or composure. This means that fashion, or at least personal style is always going to be significant in a female’s sense of psychological not to mention physical security.

It is worth recognising that in spite of several generations of feminist censor there’s been less than expected impact on style as a sustaining influence upon women’s contemporary existence. The long held myth that we women dress predominantly to appeal to the opposite sex, rather than as an expression of our own cultural condition or personal ideals has proved harder to disabuse, in part due the international fashion industry’s marketing of sexuality as an open source commodity.

Nothing could be further from the truth for women of course, but it’s not surprising that the legend prevails, given the extremes the industry goes to in promoting its endlessly mutating season-by-season products.

Possibly because I grew up in the New York art world and migrated to London’s cultural scene some years later, I’ve long felt style is lived as opposed to sought and bought. Twenty-five years ago, many of my so-called cultural tribe were pretty self-conscious about where we fitted in contemporary fashion’s food chain. Although largely a group of artists and writers, most of us could little afford the mainstream industry’s high-priced entry tag.

So, in those self-inventive days of the burgeoning downtown Manhattan underground art, music and literary scene, we innovated, conspicuously, defiantly and most of all definitively, creating an authenticity of looks, as the performance artist Leigh Bowery would later call his exquisite sculpted costume masterpieces, as codified signatures of our individuality, rather than as imitations of unaffordable current trends.

Adorned in red eye shadow, hair rolled onto the front of my brow in the style of Blade Runner’s most beautiful automaton, I dressed for success in gallery and magazine life in patent blue leather high heeled cowboy boots, my boyfriend’s pink Jermyn Street shirt and plastic ear rings shaped like martini glasses. Another prized outfit was a dress constructed of carefully torn red and black suede tied ingeniously at strategic moments and pre-loved platforms shoes said to have once belonged to a famous Pink Floyd groupie.

It was hard work remaining as vigorously original as the downtown cultural clique demanded, let alone making my way around Manhattan in those costumes. The few garments surviving those odd decades bear a definitive tribute to the immense effort it took.

With luck and a degree of self-awareness uncoupled from seasonal market pressures, a woman’s personal style has the exquisite evolutionary advantage of ripening beautifully with age. Gore Vidal’s view that, “style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn,” becomes less of a challenge and more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But for younger New York women, the power of cultural trends, as opposed to the development and possession of personal style, has become if anything, even more brutal. According to the New York Times, many young females now aspire to a bi-coastal image, dressing in summer clothes during the chillier months, imitating “images of demi-clad stars pushing strollers and sipping lattes” in “E! Entertainment and celebrity magazines”.

But let us not condemn those wretched uptight souls who no longer know themselves well enough to put on a jumper when it’s freezing outside. Consumer marketing’s vicious grip on the shape of contemporary imagination has changed the way many people exist without their noticing. Beneath this year’s skimpy winter dresses lies last year’s tummy ring, and the year before’s toe tattoo.

Indeed, to define themselves, 25 years after my generations’ subversive self-styling became tacitly absorbed into the marketplace’s vastly increased menu of options, many seek what may be considered to be far more extreme alternatives to mainstream conventions.

Piercings, ritual scarring, tattooing and other forms of semi-permanent body decoration have become fairly commonplace among young westerners as a mode of self-definition, displaying the appearance of a deeper level of personal risk and experience. Once the exclusive territory of tough guys, inmates and sailors, tattoos especially have now made the transition into mainstream acceptability, albeit with parental permission requirements.

Still, in many instances, the impetus to pierce and puncture quite often literalises an individual’s paradoxical desire for inclusion and rejection of a range of well-defined social orders. But content is everything, as publishers say, so even in body art, last year’s serpent may soon be superceded by this year’s dragon.

While there are many insightful sociological and anthropological treatises on these well-established phenomena, my current interest lies more particularly in the cultural realm of idealised tribalism, at the expense of awareness of tribal realities in today’s world. National Geographic, that long established barometer of mainstream culture’s armchair-bound ethnographic consciousness, now offers an online Authentic Shopping Guide, leading readers to well, “genuine”, as opposed to fake, local craftspeople in far-flung regions. The concept is so politically correct and so anthropologically hygienic it literally smirks with the satisfaction of a Fifth Avenue department store sale purchase.

Whether or not the international travel and fashion industry chooses turquoise and amber beading, or handcrafted leather fringing teamed with shredded silk as next seasons’ must-have look, is secondary to the personal impetuous to assume, often at relatively high personal costs, a visual affinity with distant, unfamiliar and culturally uprooted disjunctive tribal imagery.

Again, let us not judge those whose misguided nose rings, Japanese Manga-styled tattoos and weighty hand-made silver jewellery have already felled them with the speed of a retro bullet.

What is of far more interest is how the legend of the acquisition of authenticity is lived and told without the experiential context of having visited those teeming smelly bazaars, crowded melees or winding lanes lined with open drains to find that perfect goat skin pouch, choker of chewed pearls or crushed gold threaded sari-fabric knickers.

Where do westerner’s shopping expeditions for “authentic” artifacts and outfits to enhance identity-deprived lives, fit against the perilous existences of those who made these items in the first place? Or, to put in another way, why has there been so little value adding to consumer consciousness of tribal conditions, in spite of the entrenched trend of acquiring cultural legitimacy through purchasing ethnic goods?

Indeed, the only remaining vacant space in this specifically western moral conundrum is that occupied by the ubiquitous middleman, branded purveyor of those hard-to-find Kuba cloth skirts and batik headbands. But who cares about how difficult it is for Myer to bring “naturally” handcrafted panama hats to its loyal consumers this season?

The narrative of wholesalers’ sacrificial at-source achievements has swiftly become another product specific ideal for the conscience-driven western consumer, who have learned to pay almost anything for so-called fair traded goods brought into our lives by retailers claiming they really do care about sustainable coffee, craft and cosmetics. Perhaps it is not so much a question of why some of us adorn ourselves in tribally derived costume and jewellery but how?

Perhaps too, the assumptions I’m making about the acquisition of goods, equating with cultural authenticity achieved without undertaking the effort of the journey itself, are of less significance in today’s globalised market place. But as the global map steadily compresses, ancient symbolic handcrafted ornamentations of tribal existence are constantly being re-contextualised, except for the many who are still using them in life rituals.

For the Gujarati desert women carefully sewing several hundred embroidered skirt bands ordered by a western agent, the price of their labour is still much lower than a train ride from Sydney airport to the CBD. But it’s a price that will afford a new village hand pump, another month of outdoor schooling or an urgent visit to a doctor and they know it’s worth it. But do we?

Although the price disparity bothers many, in our own culture made up of many distinctive ethnic influences, we Australians paradoxically struggle and all too often fail at pronouncing foreign sounding names, let alone those of ancient tribal traditions, artifacts and activities. Do we deserve authenticity if we’re not prepared to enunciate its origins correctly? Has our exasperated, impatient, characteristically nationalistic demand for social homogenisation placed the realities of cultural authenticity beyond our ethical reach? Discuss!