Monday, September 21, 2009

Window Shopping For College

Applying to college can be a very anxious time. One filled with many troubling questions like, “Will other people dress like me or shop at the same stores?” Or “will I be able to share cute clothes with my roommates?” Thankfully questions like these ones can be answered with The Princeton Review’s 371 Best Colleges. Within its pages, the book maps out numerous colleges with regards to their ranking, class size and dress code, yes, dress code.

http://www.greenrightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2010_best_colleges.jpg

With the help of this book, you can sleep soundly at night knowing whether or not the wardrobe that you had been building over the past four years matches those of their future classmates. The book dishes on whether the campus is a cut out from a J.Crew magazine or an ad straight out of Vogue. With these descriptions, The Princeton Review allows students to “window shop” for colleges.

This idea was mentioned in Sturken and Cartwright when they explained that, “it has been argued that in consumer societies people derive their sense of their place in the world and their self-image at least in part through their purchase and use of commodities” (268). It was referenced as well in Bignell’s article, calling the practice and indexical sign of our social identity.

As we become more and more consumed with culture, soon everything will be associated with a brand name or designer label.

No comments:

Post a Comment