Fashion and Television -- Rituals and Stereotypes

Performing ritualistic activities bring us together with family, friends and strangers.  Some rituals are performed out of obligation and others are done out of sheer pleasure.  A ritual can be a formal as swearing in to testify in court proceeding or as simple as watching a weekly television show.  Whether we admit it or not, most of us have a television show that we watch. Some of these shows may be guilty pleasures that we might be embarrassed to admit that we watch.  Other shows, however, quickly gain a cult-like following.  These are the television shows that we rush home to watch, ignore the telephone and meet our co-workers by the water cooler the next morning to process the storyline.  One show that garnered this type of cult following was Sex in the City, which was a story about four professional women living in New York.  Although the story line focused on their friendships and love lives, much of the interest centered on what the four protagonists wore each week.  The topic of fashion and the shoes quickly became buzz around female family members, friends and co-workers.  The greater the interest in the fashion behind the show, the stronger the ritual became.  In order to be part of the socialization behind the show, you had to participate in the ritual of watching the show each week.  That ritualistic behavior then transferred to shopping behavior.  For viewers who watched the show out of love for the fashion, emulating the fashion style of the characters became a natural extension of the ritual.
Television is a wonderful medium that connects us to people from other cultures, religions, and ethnicities.  Given that we watch so many shows with ritualistic fervor, it can be easy to mistakenly believe that the characters we watch on television reflect real people who share the same skin color, religious affiliation or even style of dress.  Stereotyping in itself is simply an impression that we have based on our past exposure and experience.  The pervasiveness of television viewing contributes greatly to how we stereotype people based on their dress.  It might be safe to say that most citizens in this country have never been exposed to gangs directly.  Even so, most of us would be able to describe how a gang members might dress based on the many weekly crime shows that we watch.  If the television gang members we watch dress in low-riding pants, hoodies, and a ball cap, the danger is that we might assume that anyone dressed in a similar manner is a gang member.  Similarly we might assume that anyone we see dressed in a suit is a harmless business man.  These fashion stereotypes can be dangerous as they are just one piece of information or a first impression if you will.  Two examples of how wrong these fashion-based stereotypes can be are Ted Bundy and Trayvon Martin.  Based partially on how he was dressed, victims of serial killer Ted Bundy incorrectly assumed he was a safe person with harmless intentions.  Conversely, in recent news, the death of young Trayvon Martin tragically may have been the result of stereotyping based on his dress.  We need to be cognizant of the fact that fashion style reveals only one small piece of the puzzle.