In postmodern society, physical appearance has become increasingly central to defining personal identity, as evidenced by the proliferation of features in newspapers, magazines, and television concerned with the health, shape, and fashioning of the body, and by the advent of a plethora of products and technologies for modifying the body, such as diet pills, exercise programs, and cosmetic surgery. Individuals are now expected to undertake regimes of body maintenance designed to sustain and improve their health and physical appearance, and failure to do so is seen as a sign of moral laxity. As Mike Featherstone points out, in our modern consumer culture, a new conception of the self has emerged- namely, the self as performer-which places great emphasis upon appearance, display, and the management of impressions.
This replaces the nineteenth-century concern with character in which primacy was given to such qualities as citizenship, democracy, duty, work, honor, reputation, and morals. Whereas previously, greater emphasis was placed on other sources of identity formation than that of personal appearance, increasingly, the self is defined primarily in aesthetic terms-that is, in terms of how one looks rather than in terms of what one does. This aesthetic cult of the self is a fundamentally contradictory project. On the one hand, it is a project that has been increasingly seen in individualistic terms in which the fashioning of personal appearance is conceived of primarily as an expression of individual identity. In contrast to earlier epochs where one's outward appearance was taken to be indicative of one's social role or status, now it is seen, first and foremost, as a projection of one's inner self. As Anthony Giddens argues, under the conditions of high modernity, the body has become a self-reflexive project, integral to our sense of who we are. While in premodern societies, modifications and adornments of the body were governed by traditional, ritualized meanings, the body in modernity has been secularized and is more frequently treated as a phenomenon to be fashioned as an expression of an individual's identity, rather than in accordance with some traditionally given system of meaning. In contemporary culture, we have become responsible for the design of our own bodies.
However, at the same time as the aesthetic cult of the self has been increasingly conceived in individual terms, there has been a deindividualization of the self. In place of the Enlightenment notion of the self as a unified entity with a fixed essence, it is now seen as something that is fragmentary, decentered, and constantly mutating. Indicative of this is the increasing ease with which individuals adopt and discard various guises in the world of postmodern fashion, where no single style reigns supreme. Confronted with a mélange of different styles derived from a diverse range of sources, individuals today are more likely to experiment with a wide range of different "looks" as is epitomized, for instance, by the radical "makeovers" in appearance undergone by celebrities such as Madonna and Michael Jackson. Polhemus characterizes the typical postmodern fashion habitué as a "style-surfer" who treats identity as something that is infinitely malleable. Rather than regarding the various guises that one adopts as expressive of a "self," which exists independently of them, the self is defined through the masquerade-there is no self apart from the masquerade. In this sense, the self is "depersonalized," being dissolved into the various masks that one adopts.
The contradictory nature of postmodern "body" projects leads to a paradox. At the same time as the rhetoric of individualism grows ever stronger, appearance has become less expressive of the individual. The more importance we invest in reading appearances as a sign of individual character and personality, the less they reveal about individuals, as the looks we adopt become more depersonalized. While we continue to seek to discover revelations of the self in outward appearances, at the same time, the meaning of items of dress and other forms of bodily adornment have become more and more ambiguous. In postmodern culture, such items, as Baudrillard points out , have become "free-floating" signifiers, signifying nothing beyond themselves. One of the significant features of bodily adornment in contemporary culture is the degree to which it has become "undercoded." That is, items of dress no longer clearly signal attributes such as the class, occupation, or ethnicity of the wearer, but have, to a large extent, been stripped of their meanings, as they are pastiched together in unexpected combinations.
The coexistence of these two apparently contradictory trends is symptomatic of the increasing difficulty that individuals have in forging, for themselves, a meaningful sense of identity through the fashioning of their physical appearance. The more they seek to ground a sense of themselves through the cultivation of a certain "look," the more chimerical this proves to be, as one "look" is no more "authentic" than any other.
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