The Influence Of Clothing In Today's Society

Society has many different methods of influencing us to be a certain way. This can be done through trends shown in magazines, facebook, twitter and other forms of social media. You will see models wearing a certain style of clothing to influence people to wear that kind of clothing style. Celebrities are always being exposed and it will completely make or break their image. There are stereotypes all over social media put into jokes or used to attack a specific group of people. Society has been molding people for a very long time and we can see that in the books that we have read this semester.

In The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, and Of Mice and Men, the people dressed in a very distinct way. The women were supposed to wear neutral colors and nothing “flashy”. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne did not abide to this trend. She wore more radiant colors and made embroidered the letter ‘A’ to her chest in a very flamboyant way. She also dressed Pearl in bright, extravagant colors. Hester was looked down upon by the entire town partly because of this. In today's society, we have multiple trends for fashion and if someone were to dress outside of these trends they would most definitely be overlooked. Today’s trends are mostly concerned with what brand you are wearing. At school, you will see a lot of people wear Hollister, American Eagle, Pink, Under

Armor, and various other brands. We don’t see celebrities walking around in old-timey dresses.
Reputation has become everything. In The Scarlet Letter Arthur Dimmesdale kept his secret until he died purely because he couldn’t handle ruining his reputation. It was and still is very important to people, especially celebrities. A celebrity's reputation can easily make or break their career. An example could be Britney Spears. She had that huge freak out in 2007 and that is remember by everybody because the media made it so public. The media has easy access to make things go public and they can ruin people’s reputations or make them better. We even see this in school with the spreading of rumors.
Stereotypes are another thing that society uses.

People are always being put into social groups in our everyday life and people put down these groups with harsh words. In Of Mice and Men, Crooks is black so they kept him in a stable with the animals instead of with the other ranch hands. Curley’s wife was a woman and in this time period, all women were expected to stay in the house and only speak to their husband. She wanted to talk to people and be out of the house so the men all called her a tart, jailbait, or a tramp. Stereotyping is sadly still a thing that society uses to wrongfully put people into social

groups.
Society has multiple methods of shaping people. It’s not just today’s media, this has been going on for centuries. We saw examples in The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, and Of Mice and Men. People are told what clothes are okay to wear. Reputation can be everything for some people. Society has also stereotyped. Our culture has always shown that it shapes how people should be.