Branding

I have never been a fashion-conscious person. In high school, I found it downright mysterious that anyone would pay attention to a commercial label on a pair of pants or a shirt.

It was pretty easy for me to dismiss this as adolescent shallowness at the time, but then I got to college. Everyone (except me) seemed to be aware of who wore J. Crew and who wore Gap. I mentioned this to a friend of mine, who I thought of and still think of as an intelligent, substance-oriented person, and he responded that while some labels mean nothing about the people who wear them, others do.

"If I see someone wearing Tommy Hilfiger, it means they want to come off as a certain type of person," he explained.

What type of person?

"You know, the type who wears Tommy Hilfiger."

Right.

What he was expressing was neither stupid nor shallow. Even mass-market fashion serves as a form of expression, broad and unspecific as it might be, and it's a language people use to communicate before ever speaking a word to each other. If you heard last weekend's This This American Life, you know about a great example that involved acid-wash jeans. Of course, that turned out to be a communication that neither party understood, but that's life.

Even people who don't specifically look at the label -- and, again, I am physically incapable of doing so without putting my nose up to some one's sleeve -- still take a message from the style and cut of the clothing. Had someone trained me, or had I trained myself to do this when I was a kid, I probably wouldn't be at too much of a disadvantage now.

At the same time, I'm a little proud to be out of the fashion game. Well, not entirely -- I do put a little thought into what I wear -- but cheap and comfortable are ideal for me, and no one seems to complain. I may be contributing to slave labor by buying cheap, but that's an entirely different issue.

Full disclosure: I do own two paris of Tommy Hilfiger bedsheets. They were given to me. I happen to like them because they're comfortable. If this communicates anything about me, I do not need to know it.