Michael Kors Individuality

Your individuality is social, as is mine

I was 13 when I made wearing Nikes the pinnacle of my fashion aspirations.

My expat classmates began to wear them to after school events. This trio of expat children, having just flown in from their lives in the UK, the Middle East and most excitingly, the US, had one pair each of the pink, the blue and the grey “floaters”. This particular pair of sandals were flappy and flat, nondescript, and not even comfortable. But that didn’t stop them from becoming couture in my private school.

Did I love them? I don’t remember even wondering.

Did I want them? I absolutely did.

To my untrained pre-teen eyes, taste was incidental. Belonging was everything. 

Little seems to have changed two decades down for my world. We have graduated from wanting Nikes to wanting LV and Gucci, stopping along the way at pitstops marked by Michael Kors and Coach. 

Who am I  

We think of ourselves as people who value individualism, and we assert ourselves in frivolous ways.

…but also, not

With 8 billion people on God's green earth, coming from 8 billion childhoods and an exponential order of challenges, heritages, and influences, this assertion of individuality feels silly. 

It should go without saying.

We are all individuals, unique like only each of us can be. 

At the same time, our family, friends and even foes influence who we are and what we do. How we dress — unless every man in Bangalore city truly feels his best in a floral button down half sleeved shirt on Saturdays. The colleges we aspire to: engineering, medicine or law, IITs, IIMs or National Law Schools. The cars we buy; compact SUVs are so 2020. Even the schools we send our kids – whatever looks closest to the Montessori method my nephew gets in Madrid. 

Our individuality disappears in community. 

A mere performance

But this isn’t the indictment of mimetic desire that it sounds like. It’s more a deep dive into when we find ourselves able to express our unique individuality.

Why do some Indians feign an American accent the day they reach American shores? Why is the rivalry between the Indian Premier League cricket teams, Chennai Super Kings and Mumbai Indians, called el-clasico?! Why were Nikes the stuff of my dreams at 13?!! 

Self expression is nothing in the absence of someone to express ourselves to. 

And what we consume (whether Nikes or Michael Korls), how we converse (as with slang or with accents), and the fads we hold convictions about (from el-clasico to educational methods) are all, in part, ways of self-expression.

If we had no one to express ourselves to, we might let loose the parts of ourselves we never show. The way that journaling is unburdening in the way that Tweeting isn’t.

But when we have someone to express ourselves to, we might imagine their presence even when they aren’t literally present. The way some of us become our jobs after performing our commitment to them for a time.

Jia Tolentino, drawing on Erving Goffman’s 1959 work, calls this mode of expressing ourselves a performance. 

The performance might be calculated, as with the man at a job interview who’s practiced every answer; it might be uncon­scious, as with the man who’s gone on so many interviews that he naturally performs as expected; it might be automatic, as with the man who creates the correct impression primarily because he is an upper-middle-class white man with an MBA. A performer might be fully taken in by his own performance – he might actu­ally believe that his biggest flaw is “perfectionism” – or he might know that his act is a sham. But no matter what, he’s performing.

As Jia says, the performance varies from audience to audience, pausing for a breather only at home — where we are metaphorically “backstage.” 

Hide and seek

Whether the performance is intentional, subconscious, or unwitting, Jia suggests that it takes “self-delusion.”  

The interviewee, for example, avoids thinking about the fact that his biggest flaw actually involves drinking at the office,” she writes. A friend sitting across from you at dinner, called to play therapist for your trivial roman­tic hang-ups, has to pretend to herself that she wouldn’t rather just go home and get in bed to read Barbara Pym.  

When we want to belong, impress, or qualify, we conform. When we want feedback, help, or attention, we give. Who we express ourselves to influences how we express ourselves.

Since our (literal and metaphorical) audience discourages us from bringing out our full selves, we come into crisis.

Between conformity and reciprocity, we hide who we are and we ignore who we can be.¹ We embody a Michael Kors Individuality.  

A way out for me has been to remember that the things I do can be a reflection of who I am, not who my audience is. But hey, I’m not God. I excel at self-delusion!

So I try the next best thing. I change up my audience. Frequently yet unpredictably. Geographically and generationally. Families of birth and families of choice.

I do this by anchoring around the things I feel most myself doing. Observing. Reflecting. Notetaking. Writing. Reading. Running. Walking. Yoga. Biking. Gardening. Bantering.

In each audience, I see new parts of me, made up of a web of curiosities, a seasonal green thumb, yoga in my studio, and biking in Bangalore, and pencilled marginalia in dog-eared books read over filter-coffee as well as pour-over coffees, in between runs and hikes wherever I go, where I make haphazard notes to myself on WhatsApp but also Apple Notes but also Notion and also Tana, to feed my Substack experiments on writing in public so I can find myself — or at least more of me.

Only my fashion aspirations continue to be Nikes (and sweats).

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Thanks in heaps to Neilda, Swarupa, Eric, Sairam, Kate, Vicky, Yiannis, Rebecca and Charlie who spotted the hook and elevated this essay (if I may say so myself).

 

1. AKA the first two decades of my life summarised in one line. But Jia takes a different view: “...The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance.” To her, there isn’t a singular and integral self we return to because there’s no fixity in who we actually are. My experience feels different, but I leave it to a greater power to settle this question. Whether we actually are someone inherently, or we make it all up as we go along, the fact remains the same - our audience elicits only a partial performance of us. One that can congeal into our full selves if we don’t change our audience.