Now that I have already established that I want to buy summer clothes--swimsuits, shorts, tanktops etc...It's important to talk about why I feel the need to buy such new clothes, when my closet is stuffed with clothes that still fit me perfectly (since I stopped growing about three years ago.) The media sends messages to me everyday advertising the new coolest things and as more and more people get this new, cool thing, I feel more pressure to buy it as well. The pressure from the media to buy new things is a heavy load, but the pressure I put on myself is even harder. I made a revelation after watching Missrepresentation, in my last post. Put shortly I realized that girls feel pressure to look good all the time. In order to look good we feel that we need the coolest stuff to wear, and look the prettiest, and follow the latest trends. In the documentary, Merchants of Cool, advertisers said that it was the teens, the consumers who "invent" what is cool, but that is not the case.
To a certain extent it is the teens who are dictating what is cool and what is not cool, but as long as advertisers keep making the same types of clothes and advertising them with pretty models who are surrounded by friends and boys, It seems that advertisers actually have the power.
Scrolling through the endless wonders of online shopping websites, I saw many repeated styles. For example crop tops, or kimonos, or another one of my favorites, flowy shorts. As of right now I find those styles to be trendy, but these styles have been blown up by the media so much already. And STILL people are buying these trends. The minute that advertisers bring out the next new style, girls will jump on the chance to buy it. As a consumer who wants to buy new clothes, unless the advertiser comes up with a new trendy style and starts selling, no one will be able to buy it, so doesn't that make the advertisers the dictators of cool or no?
If you managed to read this whole thing great job!
I think it is really interesting that we label people "cool" and "uncool" because of what they wear. Part of me wants to say that they are just wearing the clothes they are wearing because that is what they are most comfortable in, but that's totally not true. I may be over-generalizing when i say this, but people wear the clothes they wear so people will see them as a certain kind if person. For example, boys might wear jerseys or athletic clothes to make it seem like they are athletic(this is just one example out of so many, but you get the point).
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