Identity As A Construct - Part III: Las Vegas

Identity As A Construct - Part II-b: Fashion & Identity
Identity As A Construct - Part II: Fashion & Identity
Identity As A Construct - Part I

I sometimes like to just sit and watch people as they move about in time and space.

It’s more interesting to go to a larger city, sit in some unobtrusive place and watch people parading past me. Las Vegas is wonderful for people watching. It seems that a great majority of people in Vegas feel free to express facets of their identity in their clothing choices. Some of them become walking caricatures of packaged identities.

In Vegas you expect to see scantily clad women, show girls, street girls, and girls who want to look like show girls or street girls. You expect to see tourists from the boondocks ogling the sights and visitors from other countries snapping photographs. You might, depending on the television you watch, expect to see “high rollers” or movie stars. Vegas always gives you both more and less than you expect.

The first person that caught my eye, and the one I remember best from that first trip to Vegas nearly ten years ago, was a man who was perhaps in his mid-thirties. He had the slight pot belly of a heavy beer drinker, but he hadn’t gone too far yet towards the beer gut that makes men look like extremely malnourished pregnant women (skinny arms and legs, big belly). He’d been out in the sun enough that he was starting to have that tanned leather look to his skin. On his head was a well-worn black cowboy hat. It had a wide snakeskin hat band that held a small fluff of brightly colored feathers on one side of the hat. He wore a sleeveless men’s undershirt – the same sort of shirts that I now see printed and decorated and sold for women’s shirts – stretched tightly across his slightly bulging belly. His was a dingy white, not pink, mint green, or tan, and not decorated with lace or sequins or printed with this band or that band’s name. His pants were tight, peg-legged, black jeans, fairly new, but not so clean, tucked into fancy cowboy boots. The boots were also black, or mostly black. They had engraved silver toe caps (probably not real silver – silver would be too soft to serve as toe caps) to guard against scuffs and scrapes. The upper sections of the boots were immaculately polished – spit-shined I would say - and tall, hugging his thin legs snugly, coming nearly to the knees, decorated with turquoise and red leather, sporting a large oval turquoise cabochon set in silver near the top on the front of the boots.

It was very hard not to stare openly – something nearly as dangerous in Vegas as in any other big city. He was standing in a convenience store feeding coins to the ubiquitous slot machines, just killing time, or perhaps, hoping to hit the jackpot and change his fate.

One has to wonder, if he hit it big, would his wardrobe change along with his identity?

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Identity

The process of self-discovery is fluid, elusive and capricious. We find and lose ourselves, moment-to-moment, like the fleeting recognizable shapes seen in the clouds. The process of discovering our godhood is likewise fluid, elusive and capricious. We find and lose our divinity constantly. This is our mystery.

It seems to me that identity is a made thing, like art, like music, like a spinach soufflé. It’s part performance, done for an audience, often involving improvisation – even plagiarism – and part self-discovery, a continual self-recreation.

I cannot speak to how everyone does it, but I pick and choose between all the possible choices I can imagine and sculpt an identity for myself. Actually I have several identities – the work identity, the home identity, the mom identity, the lover/partner identity, the artist identity. These days all my identities are more similar to each other than they have ever been in my life. I think I am achieving balance.

Finally.

Postmodern society allows for each of us to keep a closet full of identities which we pull out and try on, wearing when and as we see fit. It seems to me that this is both a personal choice and a tendency based on cultural norms. Sociologist Victoria Alexander, in Sociology of the Arts, seems to agree, stating “…because people are more geographically mobile and can choose among a wide variety of consumer items, their identities have become fragmented and based on their consuming choices and lifestyles” (13). Did my grandmother have more than one identity? Perhaps she did, living with an unstable man, balancing a work life and home life, walking carefully on whatever eggshells the moment laid before her. Perhaps the need for multiple identities – or multifaceted identities – comes from having large numbers of people to interact with. Could it be that we need to be one person with that group, another person in this situation, and still another when we’re all alone?

In The Power of Feminist Art, editors Norma Broud and Mary Garrard, discussed identity with Judy Chicago. Chicago stated that, "Identity is multiple… when I started looking at Jewish experience people would say ‘Oh, you’ve stopped being a feminist?’ It’s because they had a very narrow concept of identity… one can be both a woman and a person of color, an American and of African descent, as well as a person of a particular class. One’s identity is larger than singular (72)."

My identity is indeed multiple. I self-identify as a member of a number of overlapping groups. In regards to ethnicity I see myself as predominantly western European (Irish, Scottish); class – this one is a bit fluid – I consider myself upper-middle class because I feel I am very fortunate in life, but I’m not sure if that’s how I’d be placed based on income. I place myself as an artist, a mother, a partnered individual, and a reluctant and somewhat anarchistic American. I have a work identity that oozes capability and responsibility, but I’d really like to chuck it all and be more bohemian, taking up an eclectic gypsy persona as my primary identity.

The clothes would be so much more fun.


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