The Colby Echo

Issue date: 2/23/07 Section: Opinions

I have a secret: for the past month and a half, I've been performing a social experiment on the student body at Colby. It came to my attention right before winter break that everyone thinks of me as a "dirty hippie." Let me bust a myth for you. Although my wardrobe consists of flowing earth-tone skirts and huge earrings, and I rarely wear shoes, few other aspects of my life style would reflect those of a dirty hippie. I shower every day, I don't smoke pot, and I'm not a member of the Green Party. Comments like, "Good job, dirty hippie, you remembered to wear shoes today!" made me laugh, but also made me realize that I had been labeled. I made heads turn and jaws drop in shock when I went to a Christmas party dressed in preppy clothes.

This is when I first got my idea. I would come back for JanPlan and blow people away with preppiness, to confuse everyone and remove the label of dirty hippie that had been stuck upon me. Over break, I went to Freeport and stocked up on reduced-price J. Crew and Polo. I had a Burberry coat I had purchased for 25 cents at a thrift store; my mother and I cut up the wool liner and sewed a scarf and headbands, complete with Burberry label. I bought pastels, pearls, and flats, and then headed back to campus to start JanPlan a full-blown prepster.

After the first few days of initial shock from my close friends, I started to notice how others reacted to this. I have never received so many complements on my clothing. Someone ran up to me, grabbed the ends of my scarf, and screamed excitedly about how she had "the exact same scarf!" I noticed people, who had clearly never known I existed, making eye contact with me in the dining hall; instead of being looked over, people looked at me. Although I looked more like the majority of Colby students, people noticed me more. More people took me seriously, listened to my ideas when I normally would have had trouble getting a word in edgewise. Of course, I cannot say if this is due to a change in my confidence level or if people actually judged me based on my clothing. Perhaps because I was dressing in Polo instead of a homemade hippie skirt, I carried myself more confidently.

Doing this helped me break out of the dirty hippie box that people had put me in. Simply put, there is more to me than my clothing. However, it turned into a haphazard social experiment; perhaps my peers treated me differently because I was more confident, perhaps because they now saw me as a true equal. Either way, this is an interesting observation of social perceptions at our school. Ask yourself: was it that I needed to dress in J. Crew and pearls to have confidence in this environment or was I treated better because I dressed in Burberry and popped my collar?

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools