WHAT WE WEAR, WHAT WEARS US
WHAT WE WEAR, WHAT WEARS US: Language of Social Hierarchy
Grade 11, Dalton Cheongna International School. Everyone wears different clothes, bags, and accessories. From the logos on our brands, the degree of ostentation, the way we're put together, we can easily tell who is wealthy and who isn't. Equality may appear to reign on the surface, but students naturally gravitate toward those who hold wealth, and that gravity becomes power, which soon hardens into hierarchy. My classroom of barely fifteen students is a society in miniature.
Human beings wear clothes. For reasons that go far beyond the functional need to keep out the cold or the heat, our closets hold a multitude of garments, and we spend no small amount of time each day deciding what to put on. Most of us have, at some point, hoped not to run into an acquaintance while trudging to the corner store in ragged clothes, or felt our slouched shoulders straighten with confidence the day we stepped out in a sharp designer suit. The naked me, the me in cheap clothes, the me in fine clothes — all of these are still me. So why is it that inside different garments, I keep becoming a person with a different identity, a different status? If I were the only human being left in this world, I would, in truth, have no reason to think twice about what I wear. Which means: the purpose of wearing clothes, once function is set aside, is bound up with the Social Gaze — and this, in turn, becomes the grammar of hierarchy that defines an individual's place in society.
The tribal chief of prehistory draped himself in the pelt of a beast; the medieval king wrapped himself in a cloak of silk. We may not remember the Pope's face, but we remember his presence through the pure white of his vestments. Clothing is the most direct visual instrument through which individual identity is made known. From a single outfit, we infer a person's occupation, standard of living, even their character. This capacity for inference has not disappeared with the passage of time — only the fur and silk have migrated into brand logos and the texture of fabric, and the crown and rank insignia into shoes and watches. Clothing wears a different face in every era, but it has always performed the same task: quietly, yet unmistakably, telling us who stands above and who stands below.
The shift in individual identity and the formation of hierarchy that clothing produces, as individuals expand into groups and groups into society, is not a matter of right or wrong — it can be understood as the natural instinct of the "social human being." Both common intuition and the historical record bear this out. I wanted to take up this phenomenon using the tools I know best. Through photography as my primary medium, alongside drawing, installation, performance, and multimedia, I interpret, dismantle, and re-assemble the codes of identity and class that clothing generates between the individual and society. Through this process, I hope to leave behind a range of questions about clothing — this grammar of hierarchy that, across society at large, wears the face of neatness, style, or beauty, while operating, most covertly, at every single moment — and to offer viewers a new perspective from which to see this phenomenon.