Chicken fashion

Somewhere amidst the myriad of lies and misinformation, I was made to believe that the clothes I wore reflected something about myself, an assumption that’s safe to say most of us make every time we stand in front of a mirror.

If this notion is true, however, then how did we evolve such vast and generalized styles of fashion?

I think the answer to this can best be illuminated within the social world of the noblest of all domesticated fowl, the chicken.

You see, the chicken’s world is very simple: There are roosters. There are hens. They procreate.

Yet the relationship between chickens’ feathers and mating habits are eerily similar to the relationship between our clothing styles and interactions with the opposite sex.

Let’s start with the rooster, or the “cock,” if you will.  These kind of males wear bright and unusual colors and a number of attention-seeking accessories like earrings, chains and sunglasses with large red temples, much like a rooster develops brightly colored feathers. They also have large attention-grabbing crests and gizzards.

Sometimes the rooster will be bred to develop nontraditional feather forms, or in other words, wear their feathers in strange ways. This development is very similar to the way males of our culture wear backside-exposing pants or popped collars.

The “hen” has its own style as well.

Most hens are virtually identical. The hens develop this through a genetically inherited lack of demand for attention, whereas females in our culture develop this through an extremely limited ideal of beauty. 

Probably the greatest implication of these two trends is the fact that both are the result of countless generations of inbreeding.

In a way, you could argue genetics and fashion trends are eerily similar in the way they produce phenotypic traits or a worn style.

When you look at multiple generations of hens you’ll see a repetition of similar gene expression, just like in female fashion, when trends like leggings keep repeating themselves.

This is a result of inbreeding.

Much like the chicken, we’ve reduced a beautiful creature — the fashion industry — into an overproduced and sexually exaggerated medium that consumes the very people for which it produces.

I don’t think my clothes say anything about me, but I’ve acknowledged the fact that I can’t help but judge others by their clothes. 

What worries me is that I judge most of them to be
inbred.

­— ktgragg@indiana.edu