Everyone wants to be unique. My friend once said: “a person loves it when he knows people turn their heads around when he walks by.” To stand out is the main reason why people continue innovating designs for bags and shirts, and these designs are just as countless as the people patronizing them. Wherever you look, there are people who try to be noticed through the way they dress.
To be unique is also a reason why people use religious and political symbols in their fashion statements. They want the crowd to turn their heads to notice them, and in order to do that, they try to ‘defy the norms’. They use icons other people would not dare use because of their sacred and significant meanings to religion and politics. But as time goes by, people realized that using those symbols is a sure way of getting noticed and so, political and religious icons became a part of their fashion statement.
Since then, the line between fashion, religion and politics became so tenuous. People wear shirts depicting Che Guevara’s face as if he is just a product of the designers’ imagination and not as someone who changed the world. The Nazi swastika is being printed as if the holocaust did not happen. Voodoo dolls, Buddha beads, dream catchers and even the holy rosary lost its religious significance by being mere items of accessory for some. Nero’s cross or the ‘peace’ symbol and the anarchy symbol (which means no law), has become popular designs for many apparel.
And sure they get noticed, but only at first. As shops and designers continue to produce items like these, more and more people wear them and use them, and so they become part of the trend – or should I say, bandwagon. Their uniqueness does not last for long as they sink in a group of people who wear the same design and their thirst to be unique actually led to an act of trend-setting.
Peer pressure is also one of the common reasons why people use these symbols in a fashion statement. When one member of a group flaunts a designed item, the other members will be urged to have it too, in order for them to be ‘unified’. They use political and religious icons for them to be noticed as a group. In that way, they can still be unique among the crowd. Political and Religious icons are also often associated with ‘punks’ or people influenced by punk rock who try to rebel against the society.
Truly, the symbols we once considered sacred and important are now just part of the things found in a closet. People wear them, they are noticed, and then they take it off, wash them and wear them again. The cycle goes on and on, and as the color of the apparel fade, so does the significance of the icon printed on it: an icon that lost its zeal and value as it becomes a mere product of a designer’s imagination. If there is something good about using religious and political symbols in fashion statements, it is that the symbols are not forgotten because people who wear clothing with the icons on it are always there to remind you of their significance. But some people do not know their meaning at all and assume that they are icons of no importance, and that is when ignorance in fashion enters.
We all want to be unique. But I hope our thirst for uniqueness would also be equivalent to the thirst we have for knowing what these symbols mean to religion and politics. In that way, we can preserve these symbols’ essence and not just become mere doodads on our apparel.
