Has this ever happened to you? If so, you may be entitled to financial compensation!
You’ve found the perfect outfit: black patent leather kitten heels, maroon stockings, a grey pinstripe mini suit skirt, and an off-the-shoulder grey woollen sweater. You step out, ready to serve, only to come face to face with another person wearing a nearly identical outfit? Well, if it has, you are not alone. Screenshots of a TikTok depicting this exact incident were posted to Twitter recently, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
I don’t have TikTok (and no, I don’t use Instagram reels either), so I didn’t think much about the outfit itself. However, those who did have TikTok chuckled knowingly at the outfit, as it revealed what was apparently an amateurish faux pas: flagging how much screen time you have.
The signs that flagged what tags, trends, and aesthetics this woman followed were lost on me, but clearly they meant something to those in the loop. They were even sufficiently ubiquitous and well-defined such that this woman was able to encounter another person with the exact same inspiration. In the absence of her stylistic döppleganger, I wouldn’t have considered that her attire was flagging her consumption of certain online content, but when I did, I promptly soured on the outfit. But it begs the question: why did everyone have this knee-jerk negative reaction to this person flagging her preferred ‘-core aesthetic’, or ‘vibe’, when we have flagged certain things to others through fashion for decades?
For example, flagging queerness through fashion, using signals understood only by the community, has a long and venerable history. In 1892, Oscar Wilde instructed his friends to wear a green carnation, which soon became an accessory that flagged that you were a man attracted to men. In 1920s Paris, cosmopolitan lesbians gathered at the bar Le Monocle, dressed in sailors’ outfits and monocles. In New York City in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Stormé DeLarverie wore perfectly tailored men’s suits, inspiring fellow lesbians. Although the carabiner has been recognised as a lesbian flag since the mid-20th century, its status as such has endured and made its way into the contemporary popular consciousness. It has been explicitly recognised in the 2015 musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home, during a song quite literally titled Ring of Keys, which is an ode to the feeling of belonging upon seeing a woman wearing a carabiner.
The feeling of belonging and solidarity is precisely what these digital-age fashion flags lack. When others in public flag that they follow the same social media trends, it instead sparks feelings of animosity and embarrassment. Although both examples are essentially an exercise in mimicry, these old-school fashion flags, such as queer flags, reflected your identity and by extension, shared principles and values, such as the bravery to defy norms and risk abuse. How could taking part in the most recent trend flag anything about who you are, when that mimicry is not tethered to anything but scrolling mindlessly? The internet means we are exposed to styles without interacting with the music, politics, and common interests and identity that anchor these trends. Thus, the system of flagging through fashion loses its basis in reality. Instead of flagging the actual life you enjoy within these subcultures and communities, so much of our style these days reflects what nobody wants to be reminded of: the amount of time we waste on our phones, our dead time.
Fashion flags may not ever serve the purpose they once did, but these feelings of bitterness and unease are avoidable. It just takes effort. Punks in the ‘70s would create their outfits by cutting up second-hand clothes and bashing them together. Even though the idea was not ‘original’, per se, each item of clothing had a unique story, expressing creation, rather than consumption. Take a leaf out of this book: take the time to go to concerts, speeches and partake in communities that you connect with, and people-watch there. Scour thrift stores yourself rather than purchasing someone’s Amazon basket, and you may find that all eyes are on you when you go out, not because you’ve unwittingly dressed identically to a complete stranger, but as others look to you and see something in your life they connect with.
