Clothing and Ethnic Diversity

Social and Ethnic Markers

Clothing ensembles are visible and rapidly seen symbols in the United States used to signal ethnic identity or heritage. They constitute cultural constructs, conjoined into a unified, imagined identity that labels a social group and asserts its members’ heritage and right to claim that heritage. Clothing as a social marker offers individuals and social groups comfortable, convenient, and often unquestioned mental filters to make sense of the world's complexity and gives wearers a means to assert or claim distinctiveness. This is an important social feature for a society with a large heterogeneous population, like the United States or Canada, because it can call into question the basic social identity of the nation-state. To counter this potential divisiveness, most Americans separate unifying but gendered, basic everyday attire, which tends to be based on fashion rather than ethnicity from ethnic dress.

To wear ethnic clothing in America with its emphasis on blending in and not emphasizing national heritage or ethnic group identification in dress can engender ridicule and outright prejudice in many situations. Canada has a law that permits ethnic clothing in the workplace unless the occupation requires a particular uniform or the ethnic attire presents a safety hazard. Thus, a man who is a Sikh can wear a turban rather than the regulation police helmet in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but not a robe. There is no such law in the United States, and ethnic attire combined with physical appearance (race) has been used by security groups to identify potential threats; this is often referred to as ethnic profiling.

In contemporary America, people who are descendants of immigrants use heritage clothing on special occasions or for celebrations that mark a simplified ethnic ancestry that utilizes nationality and ethnic or linguistic group but more rarely village or regional origins. Thus one shows Polish heritage but not that of Krakow or Polnaz as regional variants. Usually what was worn by rural (nonelite) populations in the early to mid-19th century in the home country is now worn without subregional (i.e., village) or class markers.

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