THE RISE OF THE ARCHETYPE, THE DEATH OF INDIVIDUALITY, AND THE ATACAMA DESERT

Cultural unity is one thing, but the complete over-saturation of modern American culture by "trendiness" feels more like a plaster mold for us to lay down in and stand up changed. Overnight, we can become the preppy, old-money clean girl of our dreams, as if this hyper-niche person has always secretly been inside of us and has finally been allowed to step out through a pack of multicolor claw clips from Amazon.

But of course, this never lasts. All at once you can change again, and suddenly you've always been an undercover goth chick or a "rockstar's girlfriend", despite exclusively listening to overdone pop hits from 2019. Suddenly, you must buy a new wardrobe and leave your old clothes in a bin on the curb, because who would wear any of that garbage? Certainly not you.

Photo by Tyler Mitchell, 2017 "Untitled"; courtesy of Vogue

And although the constant indecision and hyper-labeling surrounding identity is dystopian in and of itself, what strikes the most fear into the hearts of onlookers like me is that these trends are entirely driven by the companies that supply what it takes to be a vanilla girl or a cottagecore girl or an indie sleaze girl. We aren't looking at trends as decided by the individual; instead, we are fed advice by influencers with brand deals about how to be this hyper-niche version of yourself.

Clothing trends are no longer tied to the clothing themselves and the color palette of the season or decade. In this new age, what you wear and the items you surround yourself with make up who you are, and it all must go together to make up one cohesive, monochrome, exaggerated characterization of yourself. The cool girl. The grunge girl. The Barbie. The "grandpa" friend. The artist. You get the picture.

In this way, it is the corporations that produce the items you use or the clothing you wear that shape your entire identity. We have given them the power to create our personality, to manufacture us a skin-suit premade with a backstory, a list of likes and dislikes, and maybe even a soul, all of which we can slip into overnight with a set of heatless curlers.

Image courtesy of Wix image stock

Not only are these habits detrimental to our sense of self, but they are also detrimental to our planet; most of us are distantly aware of this, but putting the damage in terms of literal instances rather than some faraway concept makes the situation intimately disconcerting.

Chile's Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, is home to a textile landfill responsible for the disposal of over 66,000 tons of clothing consisting of shipments from Europe, Asia, and North America. We see before us a landscape that was once soundless and could elicit to the human mind ideas of romanticism and religious naturalism, reduced to a dump that became visible from space in 2023.

Every cow print bucket hat, every matching set of workout clothes, every pair of chunky shoes that don't fit all seem to be essential to our lives, even more essential than the dirt we stand on. Why else would this mess be perpetuated the way that it is? If you don't have this set of plastic flower rings, then your identity is incomplete. If you can't be a manic-pixie-dreamgirl, maybe the people around you will see the mask start to slip, see the real fallible individual beneath. And considering how integral the mask has become to our daily lives and the consumption habits that rule over us, of course no one has time to think about the Atacama Desert or Somalia or Syria or, least of all, the workers who actually make the clothes.

It was reported by Friends of The Earth (UK) that 93% of brands in a 2023 assessment did not report paying their employees a living wage. This stat is supported (and my worries exacerbated) by the documentary Inside the Shein Machine, in which reporter Iman Amrani goes undercover inside the Chinese fast-fashion company Shein and details extreme instances of labor law violations.

Furthermore, the mistreatment of workers in fast-fashion factories is common knowledge in most Gen-Z and Millenial circles. No one is surprised by these exposés, but they nod their heads, agreeing that we need to make a change and touting THERE IS NO PLANET B bumper stickers. They shout about the mistreatment of the planet and are in full support of environmental reparations right up until their easy access to the latest cami top is threatened.

It's a case of object permanence. The Atacama desert is not right in front of them, nor the millions of underpaid individuals employed in fast fashion factories, but their desperate search for identity is.

Image of the Atacama Desert, ROBERTHARDING / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

As dire as things may be, though, this article is not a call to separate "the intellectual" from "the consumer"; although there may be a clear distinction here, real life is much more nuanced. Every person you know who participates in contemporary fashion culture isn't a self-centered sheep and every beauty influencer isn't out to get you. As this micro-trend-saturated social sphere takes over, it's important to recognize each person as an individual, rather than putting them into boxes. Yes, the folks who get wrapped up in the clean girl and the mob wife and the dark honey lip butter fads are different from me, but putting them all in a box would be participating in a culture of characterizing and categorizing people to fit inside certain molds. I cannot write them all off in my mind, because then I'd be no different than the corporations lumping together the ones who wear green and the ones who wear pink.

Instead, I think it's important to band together with your fellow man and lead by example by examining the things you enjoy. Do you really like these things, or were they fed to you by an algorithm? Does your clothing hold long-term meaning in your life? Are there stories associated with the objects you surround yourself with, other than that you bought them online during a "rebranding" of your identity? Do you find yourself buying and selling or giving away clothing or objects often? Is there a constant in and out flow of the things you own? Do you find yourself trying to fit into an "archetype", and is this archetype achievable through spending money?

Image courtesy of Wix image stock

If you're wondering how integrating the rejection of microtrends into your life will affect you (or wondering where to start), check out this article by Sophie Clarke!