READING RESPONSE

1. What motivates individuals to choose their particular styles of dress? In what ways does clothing play a role in shaping a person’s identity as male, female, or belonging to different gender identities? Can you give some examples that are not from the reading?

People choose styles to communicate who they are, or want to be. Usually, this happens within a cultural field that carries strong norms about appropriate appearance.

In Fashion, Identity, and Social Change, the author argues that clothing is a highly visible way we construct identity and mark or blur social boundaries of class and gender. Garments can both maintain status lines and change them, and even act with a kind of cultural agency that actually shapes behavior. In contemporary fragmented societies, people assemble looks from many sources to fit lifestyle and subgroup affiliations more than fixed class codes. Clothing also imposes and negotiates gender: in the 19th century, women’s dress operated as social control that embodied restrictive gender roles, which shows how garments constrain bodies and manners even as some groups try to redefine roles through alternative dress in that era.

Beyond the readings, we can see similar dynamics today. For example, streetwear signals belonging to creative scenes and modest fashion blends faith, gender expression, and global trends. And drag uses hyper-feminine silhouettes to play with and critique gender norms and athleisure signals wellness identities. Gender neutral fashion like unisex tailoring deliberately refuse binary cues. They use dress to anchor or remix identity claims in specific publics.

1. Reflect on how fashion influence our perceptions of identity and gender. How do you think WT, by becoming “a part of us”, could challenge or redefine in the future our understanding of personal identity and the boundaries of the self?

Fashion already mediates identity by giving artifacts the power to “create” behavior and impose or empower identities more than itself. Clothes aren’t just signs but a new factor that constrain or enable selves in public space.

Wearable technology intensifies this because it becomes a second skin as it acts as a multi-sensorial body extension that feels like part of us, turning garments into bridges between visual, physical, and perceptual experience. As designers treat clothing as architecture for touch or light and sound, identity signals become dynamic and interactive rather than static fabric, pulling others into our personal scenes and re-writing the felt distance between bodies. Concrete WT cases show how the “boundary of self” shifts from what we wear to what our clothing does. Twitter Dress externalizes online identity onto the body in real time as public comments become one’s moving surface.

From Wearable Technologies: Between Fashion, Art, Performance, and Science (Fiction), Ying Gao’s (No)where (Now)here lights when looked at, literally making identity responsive to the gaze of others. The Soundshirt lets deaf wearers feel orchestral parts via haptics, fusing musical environment with bodily perception.

Projects like these are so interesting as they show that if WT becomes part of us, identity presentation shifts from fixed gender codes toward situational, sensor-driven expressions. In this way, it challenges stable categories and inviting more fluid, experiential, flexible understandings of self and gender.

Can fashion define what you are? Have you experienced a similar feeling in your own life?