How is the performance of fashion used as a strategy to construct identity?
Clothing has a history of constricting people into boxes. You’re wearing pants, that means you’re a man. You wear a skirt and it means you’re a woman. In the movie Paris is Burning, the subjects explain how they use this idea for their own enjoyment, entertainment and comfort. If you feel like a women, then you try your hardest to present yourself as a women, even if underneath you’re clothing you are not physically what is considered woman. If you feel like a man, you wear clothing that makes you look like a man, even if you have to constrict parts of your body to fit that role. They present their outsides as whatever they want to be instead of conforming to what society tells them they should be. And they do this through clothing.
Fashion in and of itself is performance. Nobody actually wears the clothing that is put on runways during fashion week. So to take that idea of ridiculous wear and put it onto someone that stereotypically may not wear it in society creates even more of a performance. It challenges those ideals set in place by society. It creates a different meaning to the clothing; it is no longer just a piece of sculpture put onto a tiny model, but it is now a part of something bigger, something whole. It suggests a change in the way one thinks of that clothing. Now instead of a skirt, it is a skirt on a person who society tells should not wear a skirt, and thus also a rebellion.
