Self-disclosure

We live in a time where we disclose a great deal about ourselves in public spaces such as on social media. We tell each other what we had for breakfast, how many miles we've run and our route, how our children are doing, and what we think about particular news stories.   Sometimes we reveal too much, as I had to remind a student recently who forgot to filter his information as he recounted his day of privilege and oppression for an assignment.  The presentation of self matters: you never know who is going to see what you put out there online.  Will it be a future employer?  Someone you care about?  Manage those impressions and avoid TMI! (Too much information!)

The student's ability to filter appropriately may be influenced by this time in which he is coming of age, but it is also affected by his youth.  The ability to filter or to selectively disclose is something we learn from experience.  I noticed author Sherman Alexie doing this skillfully at his talk at Cascadia College yesterday.  He draws heavily from his life experience in his writing and speaking, but the moments that he describes are embellished, fictionalized, drawn out, to make bigger points. Yesterday's story about the cherry red lip gloss and young love felt very personal, very revealing, but Alexie was really talking about complicated social identities, about race and poverty, about being an immigrant to the culture.  His first love wasn't really named Lori, (and she may not have even been his first love), but the messages intertwined in his re-telling were real, honest, and sometimes painfully so.  The story is how he gets to the points he wants to make or offer.

Alexie's books for sale after his talk at Cascadia College

Sometimes, the problem isn't filtering but unraveling and finding information.  Despite the ubiquity of social media, there are times when the big picture and the grand conclusions are not completely knowable, and it is the journey along the way that grabs us.  I picked up a book recently in which this is exactly what happened, where the author's meticulous research process was part of the story, perhaps the more revealing part, because it shows us that we can dig and dig for information, but sometimes we can't get to the very bottom of a story.  In this case, time and place and context complicate our ability to know about a life, especially one that was so carefully guarded, at a time when documents were on paper and easily lost or destroyed.  In Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France, writer Nicholas Shakespeare sets out to discover what really happened to his aunt,  a fairly ordinary, if beautiful, woman stuck in France during the Occupation, (New York Times review here).  By the end, we don't know exactly what happened to his aunt.  Talk about impression management! Priscilla was discreet, she was the master of what the French call les non-dits (the unsaid things).  We do have tantalizing details of what may have happened and we have a story about research discoveries, detours, and dead-ends.  (It's reminiscent of the metawriting in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks where author Rebecca Skloot also reflects on her research processes.)  In the case of aunt Priscilla, there's no great spoiler alert necessary for what happened to her--the story is as fully realized as it will ever be.

Will the story recounted in the podcast Serial that I've just started be similarly ambiguous, or will it come with a tidy ending, with the full story and details?  Already, the difficulty with reconstructing events that happened not quite two decades earlier, but before many of us had Internet profiles and facebook feeds, has grabbed my attention.  I know I can go find the spoilers on the Internet for this one, but sometimes the story along the way is as interesting as the discoveries at the end.  

Dressing up

I recently attended a concert by Natalie Merchant, an alternative rock singer from my college years, who, with her stunning voice. has experimented with different music platforms over the years. This time, she performed with the Seattle Symphony so her songs had a different sound and beat than her recordings and other performances do.  Perhaps to go along with that more stripped down style, Merchant was dressed simply and elegantly, swirling around in a black form-fitting dress with a lovely wide skirt, accompanied with heeled Mary Janes.  She seemed comfortable and confident in her mid-life body and I was also impressed by her long, now fully gray, smooth, loose hair.  It was as much a part of her act as her exceptional voice.  She looked real, she looked like an adult, she was beautiful.

Celebrities know more than most that outward appearances matter, as it is these that we use to present ourselves to others and manage impressions.  Some of us are more calculating about our appearances, striving to make a statement, or to express ourselves (this is how I interpreted Merchant's style), but for most of us, (those of us with the means to choose what to wear), we are just trying to not stand out too much.  To do this, we first have to know what is normative.  In the Pacific NW, for example, dressing for the symphony or dressing for church, well, these are fairly indistinguishable from dressing for the every day, and all involve a fair amount of earth tones, denims and khakis, flat shoes.  There are no real uniforms for different events, and comfort is the operative word.  The symphony crowd at the Merchant concert was dressed in this typical (in my mind uninspiring and somewhat sloppy) manner. Despite my opinion, this is simply the dressing norm where I now live, the Seattle aesthetic so to speak.  In contrast,  the French style has been described as real, adult, respectful (see two descriptions:  http://www.vogue.com/1648381/lauren-santo-domingo-parisian-style-french-women-make-coffee/ and http://www.parisescapes.com/paris_wear.html )  All this means is that the French have stronger expectations for what is appropriate dress for different settings and they do not consider sweats and running shoes as regular streetwear (see my earlier discussion of this: Les tenues, April 2013).  The French are no more real or adult than Americans, but their social conception of how an adult dresses is simply different.

In the U.S. we might call the French style 'dressing up'.  I hear that often when I have a skirt on in the driving rain, or have worn something other than sneakers to an athletic event.  I don't think of these as dressing up but as normal, or authentic for me.  I prefer styles that imply effort, thought, care, creativity, purpose (is this 'conscious dressing'?).  I also like the new attention placed on the dressing choices of older adults.  Before, it seemed that creative dressing was reserved for the young.  But, creativity and effort and style are ageless: here's a street-style blog I recently discovered that explores the style choices of older people: http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/ (see below).   Dressing up?  Dressing one's age?  How about a style where one dresses authentically for the real, adult person that one is?
Ps. There is no reason that such authenticity must be maintained when it comes to naturally graying hair. That's the adult prerogative!

The Sociological Observer by Anne Katriina Tuominen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.thesociologicalobserver.com.

Les tenues

The day we moved to our neighborhood a year and a half ago, we were startled by an entourage of French gendarmes (armed police) racing down our new street outfitted dramatically in all black uniforms, complete with face masks.  (Apparently, there had been a big criminal case involving big names and big money taking place just down the street at courthouse hence the supposed need for special police uniforms.)  We discovered, along this same street, distinctively uniformed city workers who clean, clear garbage and make repairs, while unarmed city police, in their own, different uniforms, walk by frequently, enforcing the parking rules.  At the famous bakery on the main boulevard just a few streets over, the staff wear old-fashioned dresses with frilly aprons, while the waiters across the street at the brasseries are in traditional black waiters' garb.  Throughout town, the artfully wrapped scarf is an essential element of virtually any outfit for men and women alike.  And the wearing of sweats or workout clothes in public?  Well, that means you are working out only, and you might still get some strange looks.  It's best if these exercise outfits are somewhat coordinated, unwrinkled, and maybe accompanied by some jewelry or carefully fixed hair.  You can be a little more crazy at carnaval time, as shown below, but those elaborate costumes are also carefully put together and worn.

 The French seem to adore uniforms and outfits and costumes.  They are certainly well-known for their sense of style and for the emphasis they put on outer appearance; one can think of the fashions inspired by the former French royalty and the many world-famous French fashion designers and their labels.  The French seem even able to make nudity look stylish, as on the topless Riviera beaches or in its public squares (the nude below was found in Nice).  Clever French sophisticates like Ines de la Fressange recognize the consumer appeal of this somewhat undefined French style and promise to tell us its secrets.  De la Fressange calls her variation of the style "Parisian chic" in her book of the same title, and her revelations include 'bye-bye bling' (wear nothing too obviously expensive) and 'explore' (mix and match new and old, luxury and casual).  Other secrets such as 'outfits are out' apparently do not apply to the south of France given the penchant here for a more coordinated or more studied 'matchy-matchy'  look, where shoes might match scarfs and nail polish and sunglass frames.  Even here though, one of de la Fressange's central points about French (or Parisian?) style does apply, and that is that all of the style and care put into what one is wearing must look effortless.  That must be what makes the French chic.  Meanwhile, the rest of us work hard to keep up appearances according to the French style.  An expatriate friend tells me that her previously more rumpled husband now irons his own shirt each morning for work and threatens to iron his son's shirts too for school, while my spouse's wardrobe has expanded markedly to include the floral prints and pastel colors more common in the south.  One son is no longer content with just the maillots (jerseys) of his beloved professional teams, but now must have the full tenue (outfit or uniform, or we call them kits in soccer), including the matching shorts and socks just like his teammates wear to practice.  And both sons say that they must have proper, stylish (and expensive) skate shoes, to go with their new skateboards.
 
So, keeping up with French appearances does in fact take lots of effort.  The idea that 'effortless style' is even possible is actually quite amusing from a sociological perspective because we recognize that a great deal of deliberate impression management takes place in our daily social interactions, and that includes how we choose to dress ourselves.  Some of us may appear to make less effort and some efforts may be less conscious, but as sociologist Goffman argued, we all work to manage the impressions of ourselves that we present socially, as we slip in and out of social roles and move between front stages and back stages in that setting called the social world.  How we dress and present ourselves helps us and others know our social identities, maintain expectations, and recognize how we are supposed to behave in different situations.  Both the effortlessly chic French look and the what-do-I care grungy look more typical in our hometown of Seattle are not achieved without a great deal of effort and intent.  Even the effort to look effortless implies that we are trying to manage a certain image or impression of ourselves.  Whatever that desired impression is here in France--we might call it a certain cool detachment or a sophistication or je ne sais quoi, (an indescribable quality, often referring to the French)--the French are good at creating and maintaining it, and many of us non-French are eager to emulate it.