Branding Religion

     Religion and marketing share a chief interest; proposing a "product" that is meaningful and valuable to a mass of people. Religion is associated to a variety of intended "products" disguised as faith, values, and guidelines that offer individuals meaning, purpose, and order to their worlds.
     In The Language of Clothes, Alison Lurie provides a literal example of clothes and jewelry as products in religion that both help project one's religious identity and symbol larger aims of their perspective beliefs. Thus, a cross on a chain becomes more than a piece of metal to a Christian; it becomes a representation of Jesus Christ, of sacrifice, and of faith. Similarly, in her piece Branding Faith, Mara Einstein articulates the function of branding in marketing: "branding is about making meaning--taking the individual aspects of a product and turning them into more than the sum of their parts." She illustrates that consumers are taken by products because of the ideas they represent, whether that becomes a symbol of social status, wealth, or reputation. This becomes most apparent in commercials for products where the message becomes very far-fetched from the actual product. In a 2014 Super Bowl commercial titled "Puppy Love", Budweiser promotes its drink by illustrating an unbreakable bond of friendship between a puppy and the animals/people on a farm, ending with the pun-y hashtag, #bestbuds. By appealing to the deep meaning of friendship, and the undeniable cuteness of the puppy, the company is able to attract a vast array of consumers, uniting them under the feeling invoked by the commercial. Frontline's documentary, Generation Like promotes the same idea, where marketers analyze consumers' interests and friends through things like Facebook to gage future consumers and open their markets to different communities.
     Religion functions very similarly. Although these religious "products" don't have to be tangible, they can "sell" someone like Jesus Christ or something like the idea of salvation to different consumers by applying deeper meaning and purpose to these products.

Secularism and the Demise of Religious Garb

            In The Language of Clothes, Alison Lurie explores how we use clothes as an unspoken language that can identify us within a group, or as Shabana Mir contends, can exclude us in the case of the hijab. This phenomenon can certainly be seen on campus, for example the popularity of pastel shorts and boat shoes sends a message, as these items are commonly signifiers of “preppy” culture. However, there is surprisingly few, if any, religious attire on campus.

            Hamilton is a pretty secular campus, yet I struggle to think of even one example of religious wear beyond the occasional necklace. Is this just a result of every single student being that secular, or has the campus culture changed those that might otherwise dress religiously? A Jewish friend of mine attends a liberal arts school, which has a similar campus atmosphere as Hamilton. Throughout his life, even in high school, he wore a yarmulke. However, within only a few weeks into college he shed it for a more secular, less “unique” look. According to him, he felt awkward meeting new people with it on as he felt immediately judged, a very similar experience brought up by Mir on the hijab.  To fit in and be socially accepted, he felt the need to change the way in which he expresses his religious beliefs. As Lurie puts it: “Apart from the chameleon, man is the only animal who can change his skin to suit his background. Indeed, if he is to function successfully he must do so” (209). If people who commonly wear religious garb feel isolated and pressured to change, do the rest of us have a responsibility to be more welcoming? Is it even possible to do so, or is this exclusionary effect just a universal result of a secular environment that can’t be helped?

Clothing As Identifiers

Clothing as an identifier has predated most academic writing on it. In Alison Lurie's piece she touches upon the societal implications of clothing. Lurie goes through the history of clothing as a social divider. In 2014, this fact has not changed. However, despite this lasting trend, we currently have the most clothing autonomy in human history. How we chose to use that freedom is more paramount today than ever before. Clothes are not simply a reflection of what you are, as they have been in the past, but a social indicator of what you want the world to see you as.

Clothing allows people to show more of their personality that ever before. As Lurie suggests, something as simple as color pattern relays personality. The "language of colors" as Lurie argues is vital in understanding oneself and perceiving the world. Conservative colors, such as those seen in religious communities and even in business, highlight the importance of visual appearance. Clothing signals more than it ever has in human history, complicating identification and classification.

Visual Identity

Does clothing truly reveal our identity? In today’s world, as Alison Lurie argues, clothing reveals a lot about the sex, age and socio-economic status of an individual. The things we wear act as a language that communicates to the rest of the world some information about ourselves. When a woman wears a hijab, we identify her as a conservative Muslim who is obliged to fully cover her face and her body from the eyes of the strangers. Moreover, the hijab makes Muslim women seem oppressed and shy to western societies.

As Shabana Mir argues in her article, it is unfair to make such statements because it creates false stereotypes. The wearing of the hijab is not an essential part of Islam. Just because a woman wears the hijab, it does not mean that she is subjugated or timid. I’m not sure if this is the case at Hamilton, but there are plenty of Muslim women like Latifa on other campuses, that wear the hijab and are sociable and broad-minded. One of my friends at Hamilton does not wear the hijab and is not identified by the majority as a Muslim because she dresses and acts “normally”. Therefore, the form of identity that is suggested by clothing can be deceiving in many ways. On one hand, clothing does reveal the sex, age and socio-economic status of an individual, but on the other, it doesn’t fully reveal his or her character. What is shown on the outside is just a visual identity, an abridged projection of our individuality to the outer world.

Clothing as a Language

Alison Lurie states in her book The Language of Clothes that “if clothing is a language, it must have a vocabulary and a grammar.” Lurie is making the point that people can read a message from the clothes you wear, whether it be about where you are from or what you believe in. Hamilton College is a very secular place, and I think that has a very large impact in the way in which people express religion in clothing, which makes it hard to understand peoples’ religious beliefs solely through their clothing. I think at Hamilton, we have very little choice in terms of what we can wear because of the secularity. Although people may show their style, whether it is preppy, or artsy, or athletic, religious dress is something that is seen pretty rarely around our campus. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Hijab at Hamilton and I’ve definitely never seen a boy walking around with a yarmulke. The main things that I’ve seen that display religion is a Cross necklace or a Star of David necklace. I think that the secularity has a negative effect on many students here because I don’t think that all the students express as much religion as they would like. Becoming isolated or an outcast, like many of the girls in Shabana Mir’s research, is something that many people fear, so they will try to look as secular as possible in order to fit in. As a Jewish student on campus, I will say that I don’t think my clothes can identify me, and I think I can say the same for my non-Jewish friends as well.

Sending the Wrong Message,

Sending the Wrong Message

Luis Serota

    

     Alison Lurie makes a powerful statement at the end of the first chapter of The Language of Clothes, "By the time we meet and converse we have already spoken to each other in an older and more universal language." Here, Lurie is claiming that our dress immediately imparts an in-depth narrative of ourselves and our core identities unto anyone that happens to look our way for even an instant; whether it be our socio-economic status, religious beliefs and commitment level to those beliefs, or any other passion that might define us.

     While Lurie is predominantly correct in her claim that our clothes are unspoken, but rather comprehensive identifiers of who we are to those around us, she fails to point out a fundamental flaw in this form of non-verbal communication that Shabana Mir highlights in her talk and book. Specifically in the case of Muslim Women on modern American college campuses, Mir calls attention to the fact that other individuals, when "conversing" with" these Muslim Women in the language of their clothes, totally overlook the rest of these womens' personal identities due to being clouded by the traditional Hijabis that they don, and instead solely associate them with Islam. These miscommunications lead to unfortunate misnomers; the rest of these women's diverse, unique, and compelling identities are sacrificed in the eyes of the "normal" American college students around them at the cost of wearing Hijabis.

     How can we combat these unfortunate miscommunications in Lurie's innate language of clothing elicited by Mir? These unmerited social judgements are likely caused by the innate human response to react uncomfortably, or cautiously, to what we don't see as "normal" by our standards, acting as a defense mechanism to create social-separation from these things. How can we eliminate these barriers, and perceive everything as "normal?"
   Recently, an old friend of mine published a mini-documentary on the power of engaging in "Big-Talk" with strangers as opposed to the purposeless small talk we would normally engage in with people we are uncomfortable with. In the context of the Hamilton College Campus, or really in any community large or small, I believe engaging in more meaningful conversations with strangers has the ability to overlook the normal judgements we would normally pass them solely based on the language of their clothes. In the video, Kalina asks strangers deep and personal questions like, "what do you want to do before you die?" The response she gets from these people are far more telling of their identities than any religious ornaments, designer clothing, or lack thereof might impart.

The Hostility Invoked by a Cross

There are a variety of fanatics and supporters of different causes on Hamilton's campus. Avid fans come together to watch soccer games and people proudly sport LGBTQ alliance stickers on their Nalgenes. Hamilton students are often proud to support their unique affiliations and "groups. But still, individuals are apprehensive to publicly display their religions or faiths through dress. 

Shabana Mir acknowledges how religious attire or symbols can lead people to preconceived conclusions: a "[hijab]...has these connotations for American people...maybe terrorist-related things." A dictionary definition of the word hijab solely indicates a head covering worn by some Muslim women; there is nothing about terrorism or oppression. As Alison Lurie writes, these ideas come about through "the language of dress", where upon first sight individuals "register the information unconsciously" about someone's appearance and form associations about the type of dress and the consequential type of person.

As a Catholic on this campus, I often find unreceptive sentiments when confronted over my religion. I think peers have formed negative associations between Catholicism and pressing social rights issues such as gay and female reproductive rights. I am made conscious of these ill-assuming views when I wear a cross around my neck. Students can be quick to assume one-dimensional facets of religion to be true and the same for everyone without any real acknowledgment of the individual.