Do you choose what you wear or does your culture choose it for you? I am one of the millions of Americans who struggle with keeping up with the new trends of the season. Our society works their hardest to try to persuade us into buying new things for our home, work, and family. The media today has the largest advertisements money can buy and many large companies spend millions of dollars for a one-minute commercial on one of the major stations. Television and magazines elaborate not only on what to wear and when to wear it, but also on what others are wearing such as movie stars, models, and music artists. It is quite evident as you walk around the streets of almost any city or town in America that the line between what was once considered the black style of dress and the white styles has become less and less evident. This is especially true with the younger adults. The baggy pants and shirts with labels and bright colors that were once reserved for the inner city black and Latino kids are now being worn by whites in wealthy suburban neighborhoods blending together as one fashion statement.
             I went to a private school with a very strict dress code and even there you could tell that the new urban fashion was having an effect on the way some students dressed. The girls would shorten the pleated skirts, shrink their shirts so they fit tighter, and the guys started to sag their dockers and roll their sleeves. They were basically pushing the limit of what was considered acceptable and what was breaking tradition. Being in a private school can be compared in a similar manner to what women must have felt like in the late fifties. Women in the late fifties were dying to break the cookie cutter suburban mold and become someone, become anything other than what their parents and peers thought that they should be. Little material on pants, bright colored shirts and more skin showing, became the new fashion. The more skin the better. I live...