“When I wear a blazer I get more stuff done.” Says senior Sarah Watson. There’s no secret that the clothes you wear can affect how you may act. But does it affect how other people treat you? An anonymous source says, “I think that in our school people base their friendships off of how you dress and how you look, not on how you act or treat people.” This is a sad thing to hear but some people may experience this as the sad truth. These kinds of things run through our minds and manipulate us into thinking things like, ‘they will like me if I have the new Iphone, or the new Nike shoes.’ But we don’t think about our behaviors, we just think about our first impressions on people and how we look, we think it decides everything for us, and in …show more content…
A sophomore says, “I try to dress the same as my social group.” But keeping up with the trends isn 't always the easiest thing for a highschooler. Staying up to date with the trends costs money, and if you don’t have a job then you have to wait for the holidays to roll around to ask for the newest clothes as gifts during the holiday season or during your birthday. The same sophomore says, “It’s hard to keep up with the trends at school because there are so many new trends all of the time and they can get expensive.” But just because you may not be able to buy the latest clothes to keep up with trends doesn 't mean that you can’t create your own. “A trend that I have started is wearing fuzzy socks with leggings in the winter, and I 've seen quite a few people follow it.” Said anonymous. In a small school like Central De Witt, trends tend to catch on pretty …show more content…
“I care about looking like everyone else and fitting in because I don’t want to be an outcast or be talked about, but yet I wanna be my own person.” Said anonymous. Sometimes it is hard for people to find a happy medium when fitting in. Not everyone wants to be the same as everyone else but they also don’t want to dress drastically different. Right now in high school a majority of students care a lot about fitting in, but when you get into the real world will this all change? “In twenty years I don’t think I will care about the popular trends as much because I will have my own life to care about, and I won’t care as much about what people think of me,” says sophomore Beau Manatt. After highschool and college you will start to develop your own life and will stop comparing yourself to your peers. In twenty years you will have a career, and a family to care about, not necessarily your
It was the first day of school. I was eager to see most of my friends who I went to middle school with. There was one big thing that struck me; I noticed my friends changed. They started dressed differently, acted differently, changed their hair style, and even started wearing makeup. Since the transition fresh out of middle school and into high school, my friends wanted to look older. The biggest factor that bothered me was how they would conform to look like the sophomores, juniors, and seniors. I felt that my good friends wanted to conform and be something they weren’t. In my personal view, Americans in general want to feel mature sophisticated but also want to have fun. Individuality is essential because it allows people to express who they are as an individual. When people express themselves differently and in their own way, they elucidate uniqueness and universal truth. Values in American culture can contradict with family, fashion, and the workplace.
Since the beginning of time humans have worn clothing that defines their era, race, and personality. From a caveman wearing his favorite mammoth skin to a 1980’s righteous teen wearing her all time favorite bright orange neon retro blazers. Heartbreakingly, at the school of Putnam City North High, fashion has shot down the drain as teens decide to get dress blind folded every morning. As I look around the halls of sweats and dirty over-sized t-shirts, I am bombarded with the embarrassment of having these “fashion senses” be the look of our generation. These undressed, tacky, lazy wear must come to an end before our children look back on the classes of the late 2000’s with expressions of disgust as they wonder what the heck we were thinking.
"It helps to get up in the morning and not have to think about what you're going to wear," said Maria, a ninth-grader who swims, plays soccer, and wears exactly what everybody else does at her high school in Washington, DC. Each school day, Maria dons an all-white oxford shirt, brown shoes, and a gray/maroon plaid skirt that has to be long enough to the touch the ground when she kneels. After school and on weekends, of course, all bets are off. Maria has a simple yet effective strategy: she borrows her friends' clothes, typically baggy jeans.
Adolescents is hard enough the way it is. Trying to be someone you're not makes it even harder. I hereby declare myself independent from “being cool”. There is a certain stigma that the student body has enlisted on it’s peers. I believe there is a certain shame that high school students and students in general have made the “norm”, in which students feel the need to “be cool” and fit in with the crowd. I, therefore, am sending this declaration to all the people who feel the need to be cool. I believe that all students should be able to express themselves the way they feel, whether it be dressing the way the want, wearing the makeup they choose, or the actions they portray. I believe I have the right to change the stigma of “being cool” to
In society today, the clothing that someone wears is basically a billboard for his or her personal, or family's financial situation. For children in public schools, fitting in with the popular, or most fashionable people is probably the most important thing to them. When children are preoccupied wi...
Sparkly tops, cozy pants; we never know where they come from. Maybe a kid made them under horrible conditions, you never know. My mom used to buy a lot of Gap clothes, but during 2005 she stopped. I was little so I didn’t understand, but my oldest sister did. Some rumors were going around that Gap made kids work. They forced them to produce clothing , only gaining one cent per month, they were paid less than adults. Kids were sewing and packaging the clothes. When my sister became an adolescent she started getting picky about clothing. She always wanted to dress like everyone, and the brand trendy new handbag of year was part of it. Living in Paris during a part of her teen years made her very picky and critical over how people were dressed. Paris is known for being a very influential city on fashion. I shop a lot, and Gallerie Lafayette is one of my favorite places. They have some very famous designer brands, and some very expensive prices too. On Christmas, all of Paris’s shop windows were decorated with moving dolls, created by Karl Lagerfeld. When I shop for outfits, I never know where they come from. Despite the fact I can’t know who made it, I can still know the history behind it.With all the things I know, I hope my presentation will turn out great. Learning about this topic more deeply will also help in life. At first, I didn’t what topic to choose, when Fashion popped out of my head I was very ecstatic. Being able to share something I am truly passionate about with the class is exciting.
Some people believe uniforms will not change social status in school because students will just find other ways to determine the status of others. Although some students may use other factors to determine social status, most students will not. The reason that most students will not use other criteria to determine social status is a simple one. People in today’s society tend to cast judgment based on visual factors. There are no other visual factors for students to judge besides clothing. Arguing that uniforms will not change social status becau...
In America, roughly 160,000 children miss school every day in fear of being attacked or intimidated by other students. Although this may not be linked directly to what they students are wearing, uniforms can provide a safety net for many students who suffer from bullying (Spencer). With everyone being dressed similarly, students won’t have to worry about fitting in or being dressed in the latest trend. Consequently, concentration returns to who the student is on the inside, rather than what they are wearing or what they can afford, thus diminishing the barriers that poverty and wealth naturally create. As a result of this, it is easier for students to build relationships through genuine networking skills rather than through popularity. After uniforms were mandated at Sparks Middle School, forty-two percent of students reported that they worried less about how other people looked (Wharton). Moreover, in 1998 Bruggeman did a study in which the factor of school uniforms affecting self-esteem was investigated. Two schools were compared, one with uniforms implemented and one without, and the results proved that students who wear school uniforms had significantly higher self esteem compared to students attending schools with no uniforms (Rodriguez 22). A number of other surveys completed have shown that students with school uniforms perceive their school climate in a more positive light than that of students without uniforms
I grew up a thrift store kid. We took trips in a beat up station wagon, but I went to school in Shallow Creek. I was considered a little different. We are all different. Later we will find that we are all the same. It will not matter later in life who we were friends with or what clubs we belonged to. It will not matter what our grades were, or what kind of clothes we wore. It will not matter what kind of cars our parents drove. It will not matter what our dreams were, but what dreams we accomplish. We realize that cliques are lame and that they don't matter in the real world. In the real world where we have to choose what we do all day. There are no longer laws or our parents to make us get to school every morning at 7:30.
Worrying more about others, rather than themselves, students pay more attention to the appearance of their peers instead of their academics. To begin, if school uniforms became apart of the school policy, students’ academics would improve phenomenally. Hanley noted that “The reason for the policy [was] to further improve ascending test scores and provide a safe, comfortable learning environment” (A1+). Clearly, school administrators wanted to improve test scores, and they figured if students dressed the same, then they would have no other choice but to focus on their school work. If the students can concentrate on their school work, then they will have high self- esteem. Furthermore, Valdez believes that school uniforms, positively, will change student academics: “… [they] decrease self consciousness and increase self esteem...” (14). Reasonable and realistic, students who feel better about themselves will succeed in school rather than those who have poor self-esteem. Not only do school uniforms encourage students to have a better attitude about themselves, but they also change the environment in which students learn....
Media has influenced a lot of today’s trends and ideologies. Adolescents, being on the psychological level of self-identification, bring this deceptive notion of fashion and social classes to school. The problem comes when this trend affects the performance of students and their personal lives. We all remember our days back when the talk was “Who are the jocks, the cheerleaders, the rick kids, the geeks, the losers, etcetera?” Believe it or not, the status quo in schools is always composed of them. These cliques have identities exclusive for each. Students who do not look, act, or dress the same as one group are, more often than not, left out. They could be hurt physically and or psychologically with cruel teasing and rumors. Bullying and social discrimination are both so evident in children especially in the secondary-education (“School Uniforms” 2). These are not the media’s wrongdoing. These are done by the students themselves, and administrators are not helping enough to relieve it. Counselors may help with the students’ emotional stress, but there is no other tangible solution in removing the segregation like school uniforms.
In a public setting like a high school, how a student or students dress, can have a negative effect on the entire student body, even with a dress code. On
In high school, there were the preps, the skaters, and the burnouts, just to name a few. These groups were not only distinguished by the way they acted, but they were also differentiated by the way they dressed. By looking at a particular student in high school, one could probably infer the clique he/she belonged to. So if a person had on big, baggy pants with a oversized T-shirt that had a Etnies logo on it, one could conclude that person to be a skater and if a person had on khakis and a gap sweater, one could deduce that person to be a prep. What is a possible reason that high school students dress as they do? They might use clothing style as a sense of identity(clique) or maybe to stand out among others.
Fashion is a controversial issue in society nowadays. We live in a consumerism advanced era in which whether following fashion trends or not has become a debatable point. Many people believe that it is important to follow fashion trends. For example, Lord Chesterfield once said, “If you are not in fashion, you are nobody.” The question is why fashion should be an essential matter of concern to all of us. As far as I am concerned, each person should be able to decide if one wants to follow a trend or not.
In conclusion, fashion will speak out a person’s social signal, people dress on designs that blend with their social class. Just as population, social activities and fashion are changing with time. Fashion has made clothing to be convinient, everything needs to be done with the least effort and spend the least time.