Walking around campus, one is bound to see students adorned with a variety of brand name clothes, such as Polo, Abercrombie, Ecko and American Eagle Outfitters, each signifying its own social stereotypes.

What I’ve come to realize is that these fashions have now become a socially permissible substitution for, say, having a personality. Finding a compatible friend by this reasoning, one would truly need look no further than a shirt’s label.

This phenomenon of manufactured coolness has swept colleges and high schools around the country, and has to be collectively condemned in order for diversity to be preserved.

The power commercial designers wield over our everyday lives nowadays is truly sickening when one really thinks about it. Through effective advertising, our generation has been transformed into shallow materialists wearing textile billboards with logos that communicate “Yo, this is what I wear and if you don’t, well I’m a lot more reluctant to talk to you.” While this is obviously an overstatement, the principle still holds true. There is far too great an emphasis put on clothes. Clothes have become the defining characteristic of an individual, rather than an extension of them, as they should be.

On weekends, I’ve witnessed guys and girls assembling the most expensive arsenal their wardrobe can muster, in fear that if they don’t wear something stylish and chic, as featured in Teen magazine, they’ll be found unattractive and ultimately undesirable by their peers. As though a pair of Hilfiger jeans will suddenly accentuate an ass you did or didn’t have to begin with. Please, get real.

So what happens when people can’t afford the trendiest clothes, or maybe they just plain don’t like the ones their friends are wearing? Is that reason enough for them to be alienated and barred from associating with a particular clique? That hardly seems fair. After all, the most expensive shirts are rarely synonymous with the highest quality, though this notion is so often confused.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of thrift stores, and I enjoy them for a number of reasons: they are economically sound, their merchandise is far less likely to have been produced in a sweatshop somewhere in Uganda and there is little chance two outfits will ever be replicated. Thus, one’s style is completely tailored around oneself exclusively, making the very severe crime of fashion plagiarism a lot harder to commit.

So please, folks, all I ask of you is that you give originality another chance.