From Timberlands to Victoria’s Secret PINK, Central Dauphin’s hallways are filled with fashion trends that conform the students into specific groups.
When a student walks into Central Dauphin High School, one of the most noticeable sights is how everyone in a certain group dresses the same. Cliques of girls all wearing the same shoes or brand can be seen walking down the hallway when coming into the school.
“Your fashion choices decide what friend group you fall into,” said Lizzie Adlestein, a student at CD.
Groups mixed with different types of fashion senses are difficult to find at Central Dauphin, with mostly everyone dressing in the same brands and similar styles of clothes. A Central Dauphin Student, Taylor Knupp, noted that “instead of people’s interests deciding what type of friend group they fall into, it is now the clothes they wear.”
Magazines such as Seventeen and Teen Vogue have pages dedicated to back to school style, leading to students conforming and wearing certain clothing brands just to fit in with everyone else at school.
According to psychologist, Allen Kanner, kids learn to dress a certain way to fit in. “By the time children reach their teens, a developmental stage when they’re naturally insecure and searching for a personal identity, they’ve been taught that material possessions are what matter,” Kanner stated.
Many of these fashion trends blossom from how celebrities dress, role models are splashed across the front of magazines in clothes that students at CD start to wear just weeks later.
Central Dauphin student, Rachel Aaron, said “In friend groups, many people shop from the same stores, and even though they have their own separate style they are usually similar and accepted into groups which makes them friends.”
So people may not be dressing identically, but their clothes come from the same brands and they’re similar enough to create segregated groups within the high school.
Some students wonder if this is really a good thing. It helps people find their friends, and allows students to easily join into a group of people. But, this separation of groups is not allowing CD students to befriend others outside of their fashion sense. Someone who dresses in all black with blue hair might have the same interests as someone who wears all American Eagle, but they will never take the chance to be friends because of what they wear.
Carson Sniegocki, a Junior at Central Dauphin, believes that this prevalent situation may be helpful for students. “People judge you based on what you’re wearing. It’s the first thing people see, so you then get accepted into friend groups,” Carson stated, but then added, “but it should not define you as a person.”
CD Rampage 