Aesthetic Survival: How Marginalized Communities Use Style as Resistance

People may say style is just hair. Or just clothing. But everyone who has been told to change how they look, especially when they are asked to do so in order to be taken seriously, knows that it’s more than that. 

Style can be a mode of survival. Sometimes it’s the only language left after years of having people’s stories suppressed or denied. It's where culture resides when textbooks make them invisible. It's how marginalized groups exist in a system that is engineered to look past them.

In 2019, Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, Texas, suspended DeAndre Arnold, a Black 18-year-old, for refusing to cut his dreadlocks. The school cited a grooming policy for male students’ hair length. However, DeAndre’s hair held cultural and generational significance for him beyond just a simple hairstyle.  

Credit ABC13

The school called the hair "unprofessional." 

DeAndre called it "identity."

DeAndre's story is one of many, echoing the experience of BIPOC Americans across the country who utilize aesthetics to resist erasure and assert identity. A 2023 Dove CROWN study showed that Black women are 1.5x more likely than white women to be sent home from their workplace for their hairstyle, and 80% of Black women report feeling pressured to change their hair.

And it keeps happening. In 2023, Darryl George, another student in Texas, was suspended for wearing locs, despite the state’s recent passage of the CROWN Act. His suspension exposed gaps in enforcement and accountability, particularly in how schools interpret or overlook these laws. Aesthetic policing is not a relic of the past; it is a current reality.

What people of marginalized communities have on their bodies, whether it is their hair, jewelry, various fabrics, or colors, can serve as an archive of resistance. Aesthetics can be used as a public defense, and at times, they are a final avenue to claim agency in systems explicitly designed to erase these communities. These aesthetics of resistance can be learned from ancestors, cultural memory, and lived experience, often designed intentionally to challenge norms, signal solidarity, or simply survive visibility.

But it isn’t fashion.

This can be called aesthetic survival.

But this is not just a contemporary issue: forms of “aesthetic survival” have long histories in oppressed and marginalised communities. These forms of aesthetics are used not only to assert identity now, but to combat erasure and ensure survival throughout history. 

In several parts of the African diaspora, especially southern parts of South America and the Caribbean, there are oral histories of enslaved women braiding rice seeds and contours of routes in their hair, creating escape maps from cornrows. Although debated by historians, these stories capture a greater truth: for enslaved people, hair was not just a style, but a strategy. In a world where freedom was not visible, the scalp became a storytelling space of resistance.

But, this history is not always as accepted or honored in schools and “professional” environments. Black women often face this sort of discrimination, constantly navigating experiences being told that their hair is too political, too “distracting,” and too unprofessional. For example, when a Black woman attends a corporate job interview with an afro, she is not making a "statement." She may be navigating a lived experience of many years of being told her hair is not suitable for work. Her afro becomes more than a style; it becomes a quiet act of defiance, an assertion of identity in a space that was never designed to include her.

Today, workplace discrimination against natural Black hairstyles is so pervasive, some U.S. states, like New York and California, have had to enact the CROWN Act (Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair). 

In the 1950s, queer individuals in America faced imprisonment for the crime of being "against the gender to which they were assigned." To avoid arrest, New York police instructed that individuals gather a minimum of three pieces of clothing that correspond with their assigned sex (also called the "three-piece rule"). Such a rule criminalizes trans and gender-nonconforming expression and identity. 

But the  issue was less about clothing and more about control. By policing representation and aesthetics, states could eliminate queerness from public presentation, using fear to achieve compliance, and position aesthetic defiance as a sanctionable matter.

Credit History.com

In response, LGBTQIA+ communities established underground aesthetic codes: handkerchiefs, earring sides, and keychains. These items served as signals of queerness without actually having to be explicit. Queer fashion exists now in flamboyant pride. But the culture has a history steeped in fear, coded languages, and the desire for safe visibility. 

After being outlawed for decades across vast regions of the U.S., drag has also become a cultural phenomenon, but is now encountering renewed legal challenges with performance bans passed or proposed in states like Tennessee, Montana, Florida, Texas, and Iowa. Queer style is still a revolution, by existing where it could not previously exist.

Further, for Indigenous people everywhere, clothing is living history.

The ribbon skirts of indigenous Cote First Nation women in Saskatchewan include stories that were originally told generations ago. In 2021, Isabella Kulak, a 10-year-old from Saskatchewan, was shamed by a staff member at her school for wearing a ribbon skirt to a formal event. What should have been a proud moment of expression became a moment of policing cultural history and expression. The backlash from that encounter sparked a movement – Ribbon Skirt Day – now formally recognized in Canada. Indigenous practices that were previously shamed became acknowledged on a national stage.

Indigenous regalia, beadwork, and hand-woven designs are records of pre-colonial identities, living expressions of culture that have survived attempted erasure. Today, Indigenous communities continue to wear these pieces as acts of resistance, presence, and remembrance in a world that still seeks to silence them.

Additionally, the rarely-discussed fashion needs of neurodivergent people utilizes a similar aesthetic survival. Many people with autism or ADHD wear clothing that prioritizes sensory appeal over how one looks. The world is built for neurotypical bodies, and so are most clothes. The wrong material, seam, tag, etc., can lead to a full-fledged anxiety attack for some individuals. That is why stim-wear, compression wear, and monotone palettes have become more than comfort tools, and rather modes of non-verbal identity. There can be self-regulation through aesthetics.

For many communities, aesthetic survival is not just fashion. It’s memory. It’s a protest. And it can be protection. In this clothing, survival takes the form of sequins, saris, scars, or shaved heads. When the world is silencing you, you show up, in color, in contrast, in whatever keeps you alive. Because for some of us, survival looks like style.

Aesthetic survival deserves recognition; it does not just deserve attention. Aesthetic survival is not simply a "fashion statement." It is living history, a quiet protest, and a map of survival, written on bodies and fabric. We need to stop criminalizing or aestheticizing that which fundamentally represents resistance and survival, whether it be in schools, offices, public spaces, or anywhere else. 

Gen-Z has the unique opportunity to reshape the narrative about aesthetics. We grew up online and are versatile across different forms of media and fluent in cultural nuances. We have already posted, pinned, and praised visual expressions enough. Now we must commemorate them, honor their roots, protect their essence, and stop diminishing them into mere "aesthetic trends."  

Consider the rise of clean girl beauty, which references historically Black and Latina beauty rituals and culture like slicked-back buns, gold hoops, and dewy skin. Yet this trend lacks acknowledgement for the communities that created these fashions (and articulated beauty). Or consider boho-chic, the 2020s explosion of Indigenous and South Asian fabric, textiles, and jewelry re-packaged as "carefree festival wear" and rendered with total disregard to the sacred meanings of long-established cultural and spiritual practices.

These aren't just aesthetics. These are archives. These are survival codes. These are cultural memories. And they deserve more than to become trends.

So maybe the question isn't "What are you wearing?" but "What are you remembering?"  What are you resisting, honoring, or passing down through what you are choosing to wear? 

These forms of fashion aren’t just style. They are acts of survival, and we need to treat them as such.