DESIGNING IDENTITIES: THE WORK OF TEENAGE GIRLS
The bag that 13-year-old Ariel carries to dance class used to be the top of her jeans - until she cut off the legs and hand-stitched a straight seam just below the crotch. Original pockets intact, she has added another, a rectangle of blue flannel with yellow stars cut from outgrown pajamas and sewn unevenly into the inside back with embroidery thread, bright red on one side, soft pink on the other. She has fastened a patch of velvety leopard print from the waistband down into the right pocket, and basted two strips of crisscrossed gold taffeta beneath the left pocket. A tangerine shoelace meanders over the backside, leaving space for a sticker of the American flag. A gray car identification tag dangles from one belt loop, a pink plastic pig on a key chain hangs from another.
Ariel's bag serves its
purpose well, toting leotard, hip-hop shoes, cell phone, and part of a
candy bar. Yet the bag serves another, more significant purpose: it
speaks to us of who she is in just the way she wishes to be seen.
Its
collage-like assembly mirrors the myriad aesthetic decisions made by
adolescent girls about the way they choose to present themselves.
Emerging from childhood with newly formed bodies, armed with a greater
bombardment of media's messages than ever before, they stand facing
mirrors across the country and scrutinizing the image before them. Not
only are they searching for clues about who they are becoming, they are
cogitating the possibilities of how to express what they already know.
Their bodies are their blank canvases on which they have determined to
create their very selves, and their choices repeatedly exhibit a
combination of intention, conviction, imagination, and exquisite
attention to detail.
To learn more, i have invited a group
of them to gather in my living room and share with me their reflections
about the ways they adorn themselves and the thinking behind their
selections. Ranging in age from 13 to 17, they are white,
upper-middle-class daughters of the Westchester County suburbs of New
York City. Some know one another, some don't; and while a few of the
labels on their clothing surely overlap, each girl has her own 'look.'
They
speak to me openly, enthusiastically, and their comments are punctuated
by knowing looks and nods of common understandings. Though they do not
claim to represent their generation, they can identify trends with
adjectives that refer to brands and social groupings. They are aware of
the pressures thrust at them by magazines and movies, the impossible
standards and too-perfect role models with which they are regularly
confronted. Yet this is not their focus. They are talking today about
themselves, their own choices, and the thoughts that go into their
preparation for their presentation to the public.
Listen,
for example, to 17-year-old Tori, her hair dyed a strawberry red. Tori
described one of her signature assemblages, most of which she sewed
herself and which she called her "corset outfit." "My hair is in two
high pigtails, and I'm wearing a cameo velvet choker and a boned black
corset with narrow bra straps," she said. "My skirt, which I made from
an old dress, is green plaid and fluffs out to my knees. Under that I
have on black and white striped tights and my Doc Marten lace-ups, and
a lot of silver bangles on my wrist."
Such an outfit might
not be something 16-year-old Sofie would ever wear, but she certainly
wouldn't wear it on a Monday. "Monday is a sweatpants day," she said,
"and Tuesday, too, nobody cares." But on Thursdays, she continued with
a smile, "I always wear fancy pants. And Friday is a dress-up day -
unless I have a test."
Nevertheless, Sofie insisted this
did not help her decide what to wear the night before. "You have to
wake up in the morning and see how you feel," she asserted, and
admitted that on most mornings she changed her clothes at least once in
the hour she was awake before leaving the house.
Articulate
though some of them are, it is not their reasons they elaborate, mostly
of the because-I-like-it sort. Rather, it is their decisions that
matter to them, the results that they describe to me with specificity
and confidence, proud of their product, pleased with their work.
Sixteen-year-old
Jacki depicted one of her favorite outfits, starting with the black
beaded choker she said makes her neck look "nice," and the stretchy
black T-shirt with rhinestones near the shoulder that she said is
"flattering."
"Over that I wear a button-down tan corduroy
shirt with ruffles on the sleeves," she continued. "My pants are a
dirty denim whose dirtiness matches the tan of the shirt, and my shoes
are tan suede that also matches." Her black belt is modeled after a
seatbelt, complete with the GM logo in the center of the buckle. Her
light brown hair is down, hitting her shoulders, and she wears black
eyeliner, which, she said, "is sexy with a black outfit."
For
Melanie, age 14, a pair of jeans served as personal muse. With one
pair, she said, "I cut off the bottoms and sewed on tasseled fringe,
then with a paint brush and bleach, I drew flowers down each leg. On
the back pockets, I painted stars." With another pair, she described
precisely how she rolls the cuff up with a single fold to reach the
bottom of her knee, displaying the red and white striped socks she
wears underneath.
Contemporary girls, said Joan Jacobs
Brumberg, professor of Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at
Cornell University and author of "The Body Project: An Intimate History
of American Girls" (Vintage, 1997), "have a very wide and nuanced
repertoire of opinions about everything that has to do with their
physical presentation of themselves." She cited her nine-year-old
granddaughter, who, she said, "has preferences RANGING from HER shoes
and hair ribbons to the type and width of the straps on her tank top."
Ms. Brumberg's sources for "The Body Project" were the diaries of
adolescent girls from the 1830s through the 1990s. Her thesis, set
forth in her introduction, is that "girls today make the body into an
all-consuming project in ways young women of the past did not."
This
is due, she stated, to the preponderance of media imagery to which our
entire culture is exposed - "all the visual forces at work in the 21st
century," she explained, multiplied by the strategic targeting of
teenagers for their buying power. "Kids are impacted by the models of
adult life that they see. It's no longer just family and community, but
through technology, there's a much broader input."
"It's as
if these girls have a camera running in their heads and are perpetually
filming themselves and regarding the footage," she said. "They are
constantly self-objectifying."
"Certainly girls in the past
enjoyed a pretty ribbon, a new dress or a lace collar, she continued,
but these days, the cultural setting has ratcheted up the standards.
Now it's their entire body, every aspect of themselves."
Which,
she maintained, has psychological implications that can lead to
"enormous problems with self-confidence, now more than ever before."
Now more than ever before, teenage girls have taken media s center
stage for everything from eating disorders, to oversexualization, to
calculated meanness, to a hearty normalcy. Ms. Brumberg joins Mary
Pipher, Ph.D., author of "Reviving Ophelia" (Ballantine, 1994) and
other experts who decry the plight of today's adolescent girls as being
oppressed by impossible standards that stifle and sometimes destroy
their sense of self. The other end of the spectrum was presented in a
recent Newsweek (June 3, 2002), which devoted its cover story, "In
Defense of Teen Girls," to the newly named "gamma girl," who embodies
confidence, independence and emotional health.
But for the
young women in my living room, anorexia, mean queens and gammas hold no
more than passing interest. Instead the girls exchange thoughts about
how they look and who they are. I am struck by their comfort with one
another, as well as the assuredness with which they share their
opinions. I imagine that they are in some communal office,
brainstorming, experimenting, working independently but carefully aware
of their associates, letting themselves influence and be influenced in
service of their individual creations.
"When I was in
middle school," Tori said, "I realized I didn't want to dress like
everyone else. I decided I'd wear clothes that I liked, and if I
couldn't find them, I'd make them.
"I don't talk a lot at school," she added. "This is a way for me to express myself."
Emily recalled the time Tori wore a pink tutu to school over a pair of
shorts. "When I saw her, it made me happy for the rest of the day," she
said.
Ariel mentioned the period of several weeks when she wore
the rim of a faded, stretch-out sock around her neck. "I'd cut it up
for a shirt I was making and I thought it looked cool as a necklace,"
she said.
Fourteen-year-old Laura expressed a desire for "tips" -
the style of dying the bottom rim of the hair all around. Laura said
she'd like hers to be bright pink, and Ariel replied that she'd prefer
a "deep purple or midnight blue, hardly noticeable until you went out
in the sun.
"It would be subtle," she said, "but there."
"Subtle but there" reflects the multiple levels on which these girls'
choices are being made. "It's a fashion statement, it's
self-exploration, it's communication, and it's the result of cultural
influences they are absorbing," said Amy Lynch, mother of two teenage
girls and the founding editor of Daughters magazine. "They get messages
from the broader culture through marketing and media, and then they
enforce those messages with one another."
She said those messages
have even greater power due to the breakdown of small communities where
people know one another throughout their lives. "We are living in a
society where we are often strangers," she said, "where we are not
recognized as individuals. So the signals we send out by the way we
dress ourselves take on a greater importance. For our daughters, who
are at a stage where identity is so crucial, that importance is
exacerbated. The care with which they make their aesthetic decisions is
a cultivated response, almost a survival response."
She said her
older daughter Sara, age 15, whose style her mother described as
"intentionally uncute," and who has been known to head off to school in
a black boa, camouflage shirt and parachute pants, is speaking back to
the culture. "It's her way of saying, 'I'm not a plaything. I'm not
shallow. There's more to me than you know.'"
This notion
of signaling society through fashion choices is one Ms. Brumberg
described as "using the body as a message board." "The smallest markers
can signify who they are and who their friends are," she said.
For 16-year-old M'elena, whose wavy brown hair reaches nearly to her
waist, this is most evident in necklaces. "You can tell a lot about a
person by looking at her necklaces," she said. "A leather choker might
mean 'punk;' candy necklaces might say 'raver.' You can even tell what
kind of music they listen to."
Ms. Lynch noted that young
women "see themselves everywhere, all the time - in models, actresses,
performers. These objects of beauty are not unlike themselves, and so
they begin to perceive themselves as objects that can be adorned,
accessorized and then presented. They know themselves to be canvases on
a deep level."
The girls in my living room, along with
their counterparts across the country, are engaged in the daily work of
painting those canvases. Their palettes are culled from their
surroundings and their souls. Some colors are taken from the endless
imagery around them, while others are gleaned from their fastidious
observation their peers. The rest are drawn from the deepening spark
inside each one of them that is no less than the source of themselves.
About this article
This article first appeared in the September/October 2002 issue of Communcations Arts magazine and is reprinted with permission.
About the Author
Susan Hodara is a freelance journalist who contributes regularly to the
New York Times and whose work has also appeared in publications
including Parents magazine, Daughters magazine, a Showtime website, and
salon.com. She serves as Consulting Editor for Westchester Parent
newspaper, and was Editor-in-Chief of its sister publication,
Manhattan-based Big Apple Parent, where she received a Best Editorial
award from Parenting Publications of America for her monthly column.
She is currently working on a collection of short memoirs. She lives
with her husband and two teenage daughters in Westchester County, New
York.