Consider the following comments on fashion.
Fashion declares each season that what we owned last season was never quite enough.
A society can read its anxieties in what it suddenly decides to wear.
Fashion is what one wears oneself; what is unfashionable is what other people wear.
Oscar Wilde
We call it self expression, yet we all express ourselves in the same way at the same time.
The garment that lets one person belong is the same garment that marks another as an outsider.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that fashion is a language of belonging dressed up as a language of individuality, since it lets us announce who we are while quietly enforcing who we are allowed to be. Open by granting its real value, that dress is a genuine form of creativity, identity and pleasure, not mere vanity to be dismissed. Then complicate it: the same garment that signals self expression is usually a signal of conformity, a way of joining a tribe and excluding those outside it. A strong third move examines the engine of constant change, which keeps us buying by ensuring that yesterday's badge of belonging becomes today's mark of being out of touch. Caution: resist the easy moralism that fashion is shallow, since the impulse to adorn ourselves is as old and as human as the impulse to speak.