Why expressing “individuality” through clothing is ridiculous

Once, I dyed my hair purple. It was the third term of my first year, and I had purple hair. 80% of the tenuous friendships I’d managed to make by this point stopped. People just stopped talking to me. Friendly conversations were replaced with furtive glances and judging looks.

My individuality had been judged, and it had been found guilty. Nobody wanted to be friends with someone as quirky as me. They were sheep, obsessed with sticking to the crowd. None of them could seize their own destinies, so they judged me when I seized mine.

The hub of all that is edgy in Warwick

I have a right to express my crazy, weird, unique personality in any way I see fit. People are afraid of what they can’t understand. They’re afraid of what’s different. They couldn’t handle the purple hair and they couldn’t handle me. If anything, I felt sorry for them for cutting off friendship with such a wonderful and individual guy.

That’s one way I could have responded. But no. That way to respond is wrong. When I dyed my hair purple it was weird. I don’t even know why I did it. I was probably attention seeking. The point is, people were perfectly well within their rights to stop talking to me, and only an intense amount of self-delusion and self-love would blind someone to that fact. More than being well within their rights though, they were correct.

You can’t just dress up like a goddamn fucking idiot and expect people to be absolutely on board with what you’re doing.

TWO cigarettes?! At the SAME TIME?! With a NOSE RING?! New levels of edgy here

You see it around campus all the time though! People in trenchcoats and big black boots symbolising the dark void that is their soul, or whatever. Maybe symbolising that one time they were a bit upset when their parents grounded them.

If you dress like an idiot, you’ll get treated like an idiot. And don’t give me any of this “individuality” nonsense. If you need to express individuality through wearing a horse-mask or a beanie with an animal face on it or some other such nonsense, you’re absolutely and definitely a boring person who is overcompensating. (Just to clarify: I wasn’t. I am super interesting.)

Snapbacks are NOT a personality statement

People in onesies are the best example of this. “Haha,” they say, “I have no sense of humour so I’ll wear this.”

Society’s a pretty nice and good thing. Fitting in by not wearing outrageous clothes isn’t so bad. And besides, if there weren’t people that thought like me, then people who do things like wear leather trousers and spikey red shoes wouldn’t get the attention they want.