My first act of early-teenage rebellion was buying a sewing machine. I found it on Craigslist in early July, and so found myself, 14 years old, exchanging $35 for a stranger’s spring cleaning leftovers—a compact, simple-stitch, late 1960s Singer. I told my Chinese parents—who thought I was going through a phase—that it was on loan from a friend for the summer. The temperamental machine didn’t even last that long, perhaps because it was old, or perhaps because I stayed up until 2 a.m. every day that summer splitting threads and breaking needles.
At first, it was fun to make colorful, textural things; then the things made me. I studied clothing the way a shy, book-savvy young girl does: through literature. I hoarded back-issues of Vogue to analyze fashion trends in America. While these were phases, sewing—building clothing for my individual, Asian-American, adolescent body—was not. When I wore what I made, I found that it lent me the most compelling case for uniqueness. The way I dressed validated my personality and my body concurrently. It asserted the reality of my existence.
To align the outer self with an expression of the inner self is a cultural/political act, especially for those who face discrimination and stereotyping. In my experience, being Asian in America has always come with a set of connotations from assumed identities. Making clothes let me in on a secret: I could slip into different perceptions based on the way I dressed. I was not another nameless Asian if I dressed like a Warhol Superstar or a Riot Grrrl. By rooting myself in American sartorial history, I could assert aspects of my identity that I wanted to emphasize, rather than those prescribed to me. This was a revelation: the power of playing dress up. The care I devoted to the way I dressed was an effort to affect the split-second assessment others made of me based on my ethnicity. Dressing with deliberacy and style awarded me just a second more of contemplation.
This valuable extra second has never been a case of life or death for me. Asians are stereotyped, above all, as being docile. For other people of color, stereotypes are different, dangerous. In 2012, a 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot in the gated community in which he lived while wearing a hoodie. Martin’s death sparked national protest, with the hoodie becoming a symbol against unjust racial profiling. In this case, the haunting image of the hoodie, which may or may not have affected how Martin’s shooter perceived him, is a garment weighted with cultural implication. In America, clothing is far more than just clothing. Perhaps if Martin had been afforded that extra second, he wouldn’t have been unjustly, lethally judged. Then again, perhaps not: a reality of America is that it is not fair.
These two very different situations emphasize the systematic implications of appearance. Style provides a flexibility in perception that is radical for people of color in America, who often control very little about how they are seen. Fashion is not just for the vacuous: clothing is a tool for validating the marginalized body, for asserting presence and existence and identity, and thus a tool of power and privilege. With this in mind, there is something inherently vicious in using this power to disrespect or reduce others. To perpetuate stereotype by mocking or appropriating is invalidating and thus, inhumane. It engages the same system that creates otherness, that argues that wearing a hoodie as a black American is a good enough reason for death.
“Style,” Maya Angelou wrote, “allows [a] person to appear neither inferior in one location nor superior in the other.” Style elasticizes boundaries as it moves beyond socio-economic classification and fleeting judgements. I learned this by the lamplight of my sewing machine. At Bowdoin, we learn this by way of engaging in our community, which includes many brave and articulate voices of color. In America, style can be a weapon for those who need it. However, it is not ultimately strong enough to save them from the line of gunfire. This is the work that must be done by American institutions. It is difficult to change a system to protect those it has historically excluded. All the same, it is far more difficult to exist in it. Since this is what Bowdoin demands of students of color, it is merited that students of color demand institutional change of Bowdoin. It is just about time for spring cleaning.