In the daily parades, several ways of being “fashionable”

identity and otherness in the appearance games

Abstract

The choices for dressing up can involve questions such as: for which appointments should one be presentable? How does one aim to be seen and appreciated (or not) in the social cycles in which one participates? Does one want to appear a “part of”, or an “outsider” of a particular social environment? Illuminated by the discursive semiotics, this paper seeks to explore such questions. The main goal is to understand the ways in which appearance is constructed in relation to what is fashionable in each social group, and how identities and otherness are therefore also constituted by appearances. By contemplating the tastes that are seasonally instituted and that outline what is in vogue, and by reciprocal assumption, what is not, the research builds a typology of the ways of being fashionable (or not) from the regimes of meaning, interaction, and risk of Eric Landowski, thus understanding the modes of interaction between subjects, objects, and their social groups by the dynamics of appearances. This typology comprises: the follower, the conformist, the bricoleur and the disruptive. From observations made on Oscar Freire Street, in São Paulo, we approach a common element, the white sneakers, permeating three of these types and evidencing the mechanisms of identification/differentiation which leads to the search for intentional belonging and the risks, calculated or not, of not belonging to a given social group.