You wake up and get dressed on a cold February morning. As you slump down the stairs to your kitchen you moan and then smirk when you think about your morning cup of coffee. After downing a cup of coffee and smearing some cream cheese on your bagel you run out the door to your first class. As you arrive you scope out where you want to sit, you end up choosing a seat towards the back of the classroom with only a few people behind you. The professor comes into class sets his briefcase down and sets up to begin lecturing. You open your laptop and pull up your web browser. Then what do you do? Start online shopping.
Online shopping has become one of our generation’s favorite past times. The world of fashion is at our fingertips constantly. We always want the newest trendiest top and coolest type of ripped jeans. Most college students have a closet full of trendy bodysuits, suede skirts, and lace up sweaters. However, that’s not what you’ll see them wearing to class.
When you walk onto campus you see a lot of girls in leggings and baseball caps. While there’s nothing wrong with dressing casually or even sloppily to your classes, why then do we spend a good chunk of our income as young people on fashion forward clothing. My friends wear the same 4 pairs of leggings and 2 pairs of sweats to class 5 days a week. The same one pair of PJs or the shack shirt they got that morning will be worn all weekend. It seems like we all could save a whole lot of time and money if all we owned was sweats, hoodies, and hats.
But that’s not what’s happening.
College is known as the time you develop your personal style, not just in fashion but in life. College is when you start developing your lifestyle. So, while there’s nothing wrong with wearing comfy clothes to class every day, it does say something about you. Clearly, if you have trendy clothes at home you have a personal style, so why isn’t it a part of your everyday life.
This idea of split styles, one for school, one for going out, one for the weekend, is part of a growing trend in today’s society. After graduation, many people continue this split style life. They have a work style, going out style, and a comfy style. For some people, these are all variations of their style but for many these are separate.
This separation says something about the way we are choosing to live our lives, as separate parts. We separate our lives into work, play, and me time. This can lead to our work selves feeling like we need to relax but not being able to because only our me time self does the relaxing. It’s easy to see how we compartmentalize our lives and fashion is a great illustration of this. Each compartment of our lives has its own style. This compartmentalization isn’t something we should just accept.
We need to evaluate if this is the best thing for our lives; does separating the parts of ourselves spread us too thin?
