For sale: generic individuality without originality

The other day I was sitting around with my hip young friends. You might say we were “hanging… The other day I was sitting around with my hip young friends. You might say we were “hanging out.” Soon enough talk turned to fashion, as it always does, and one of my friends was heard to remark, “The Gap is fountainhead of all that is vapid and shallow in our culture. It represents all the narcissistic trend-slave tendencies that betray true individuality; the GAP is a virus, turning everyone it touches into a helpless fashion zombie by convincing them they can be unique – just like everyone else.”

Come on. Are you serious?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a fan of the Gap; I’ve never worn the clothes. I’ve heard the cries about this wave of Gapathy sweeping over the young of today. I’ve seen the headlines, and I’m just not buying it. The Gap is not the new Evil Empire. I don’t think it’s even as dangerous as, say, Scientology.

What’s the Gap plan for world domination? Apparently, the idea is to conquer the world by selling clothing. And, well, perfume, body lotion, belts, sandals, maternity wear, etc. That’s a truncated list, but you won’t find “coolness” for sale anywhere on its Web page – I checked. As far as I know, you can’t buy “cool,” however you define it.

Yet clothes – inanimate objects – are sold as cool, by the cool models wearing them. This is where the confusion lies: Do clothes make the man or does the man make the clothes? Can your wardrobe be a shortcut to the in-crowd?

There are people, mostly those who feign disinterest in the in-crowd, who see Gap clothing and its like and sneer. They nudge their friends, saying, “Who are these people who are so shallow as to believe a particular brand of clothing will make them cool?”

The irony of this position is the snap judgment of shallowness: to judge someone’s personality by his or her clothing – isn’t that the very definition of superficiality?

The truth is these sneering people also believe in a mystical cool woven into clothing – except it’s found only in theirs. Somehow they’ve been convinced the Gap caters to brainless sheep while Holier Than Thou brand gear is worn only by the most innovative and brilliant; people like them. Reverse the brands and you have the other opposing opinion; changing the names doesn’t add depth. Finish the sentence, “Only cool people wear …” with any brand and you’re still doing the same thing: taking a short cut around thinking in defining people by what they wear.

But that’s the easy way to do it. It’s easy to subscribe to the peacock method of judgment, looking to clothing as the signaling system for coolness, and marketers know this. They understand what happens in the mind of a buyer when he or she takes a piece of clothing off the shelf and imagines the signals it sends. So they sell “cool,” more than anything.

Subconsciously we know clothing will never make us something we’re not. That’s why we resent being sold “cool.” Part of the brain tells us not to believe in the manufactured cool, that individuality is a virtue. That part of the brain goes off on a long argument about how cool it is to be unique, and sounds oddly like a self-help book. The other part, the part that just wants to belong, has already paid for the latest fashion and is out the door.

You see the victims of this phenomenon all the time – they’re called “posers,” which are people trying so hard to belong that they can mimic all the fashions, but with none of the passion. They’re trapped by who they wish they were, alone in a crowd.

But the Gap promises to save you from this fate by offering the best of both worlds: the opportunity to appear as an individual without the risk of leaving the crowd. Ultimately the only thing you can blame the Gap and its ilk for is being popular. The very popularity that makes it so appealing, so safe, undermines the coolness factor so tied to individual expression. It’s hard to be cool without any dorks for contrast, and with the advent of store-bought cool only the uninformed will be outcasts. At base the Gap offers us exactly what we want: an easy feeling of generic individuality without the need to actually be an individual. Surely you can’t blame them for that.

Jesse Hicks is a columnist for The Pitt News.