Clique Chic : At Valley High Schools, Fashion Choices Are as Much About Identity as They Are About Clothes

Baggy denims with knit tops that show some midriff--Deserie Ramirez and Alisa de la Torre have the look down cold. It’s what a lot of the Latinas at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys will be wearing this fall, they say.

Definitely not like those other girls, the ones who prefer skirts with Adidas and knee socks.

“Kinda weird,” Deserie, 15, says.

Alisa, 15, scrunches her carefully painted eyebrows. “White girls.”

Each September, the new school year brings new fashions to campuses throughout the San Fernando Valley. This is no trifling matter, and certainly not confined to vanity.

Clothes become a semaphore, a code by which teen-agers associate with a certain group and announce that association to others. Fashion separates the jocks from the skateboarders, the preppies from the heavy-metal rockers. It can define large racial groups or merely small circles of friends.

Within these subsets, whatever their size, the dress codes might just as well be written in stone.

“Adolescents fear being ridiculed and are very concerned about being in a group,” said Jane Prather, a Cal State Northridge sociology professor who has studied teen-agers. “There’s a lot of pressure to behave appropriately for whatever group they choose.”

Which might explain why Pedram Bina and Peter Massumi, seniors at Birmingham, spend the extra time and money to shop for Calvin Klein T-shirts and white canvas sneakers.

“We’re definitely part of the ‘preppy Persian’ group,” Pedram, 17, said. “All of our friends dress like this. And you have to wear boxers.”

Like Deserie and her friends, the so-called ‘preppy Persians’ use clothing as a visual clue. The uniform speaks of an unabashed pride in their clique. Similarly, at Taft High School in Woodland Hills, Asian girls are trading the baggy gangster look for coordinated outfits and dresses.

“I guess everyone’s getting more mature,” said Joann Nguyen, 15, a sophomore at the school. “Now the Asian guys are wearing slacks and polo shirts. It’s more GQ.”

Thao Duong, 15, added: “You have to keep to your style.”

Of course, those styles can vary from campus to campus, as can various cliques. The teen-age fashion terrain is complex and as quickly shifting as desert dunes. Boundaries do not always run along ethnic lines.

Skateboard apparel has become common at most, if not all, Valley schools. Skaters wear T-shirts, baggy shorts and sneakers such as Vans or Airwalks. Often, they carry wallets with chains that loop to the belt, so their money won’t fly away during treacherous aerial maneuvers. At Grant High School in Van Nuys, some teen-agers are adapting this motorcycling accessory to an even newer use: They wear chains on their pagers.

At Birmingham, this look would place one firmly in the heavy-metal category, a complement to ripped jeans, black T-shirts and bandannas. Meanwhile, the ravers adorn themselves in the same whimsical vintage clothes that define their underground, techno-pop party scene. They count an ethnic cross-section among their ranks.

Punk has also returned, taken up by all those kids who missed out the first time around.

“Rebellion is really important,” says Roy D. Adler, a marketing professor at Pepperdine University who has worked as a consultant to a major jeans manufacturer on consumer preferences. “The look has to be different than what your parents would approve of.”

Because this rebellion takes place within the comfort of a peer group, Adler refers to it as “mass individuality.” Adolescents are testing the waters, Prather adds, cautiously searching for an identity that they will carry into adult life. She worries, however, that the fashion scene has grown too complex.

“Girls had to wear dresses in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Boys had to wear long pants. Now there is more flexibility,” the sociologist said. “So there is a real pressure on kids to buy lots of clothing and makeup.”

As a result, teen-agers may be wasting study time in the mall, and perhaps, at low-skilled, after-school jobs to support their shopping habits. Even teen-agers who sneer at fashion, such as Cindy Eisenberg, 14, and her friends at Cleveland High School in Reseda, spend hours pawing through vintage stores looking for clothes that differ from the norm.

But not all teen-agers care so much about what they wear. On a recent afternoon at Sherman Oaks Galleria, Genevieve Alexander, 14, and her friends, in shorts and sandals, casually strolled past the shops. Although the sophomore from nearby Notre Dame High School keeps an eye on new styles, she has resisted the more extreme trends.

No, she does not dye her hair with purple, blue or orange streaks. No, she will not be seen in a baby-doll outfit, the prissy skirt with ankle socks that some of her peers have adopted.

“My mom wants me to wear that,” she said. “She’s still stuck in the old days.”

Genevieve counts herself among the “normal” dressers. Like Shaun Blumfield, 17, a senior at Los Angeles Baptist High School in North Hills who feels well-dressed in literally anything that goes with his Nike basketball shoes. These kids exist in a larger and less distinct group whose tastes are nonetheless guided by peer pressure and pop culture.

At Cleveland, some of the boys crop their hair like popular actor Chris O’Donnell. At Grant, some girls dress in designer chic like the characters in the recent movie “Clueless.” Teen-agers are also influenced by what they see on television and in magazines.

Again, Prather frets. Having studied Seventeen, the seminal teen-age publication that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, she sees advertisers waging a campaign to manipulate inexperienced shoppers. Marketing experts, however, dismiss such fears.

“Of all age groups, teens are the most cynical about advertising,” said David Stewart, holder of the Robert E. Brooker Chair in Marketing at USC. “They have been disappointed by products in the past and haven’t had enough life experience to understand that there is an expected amount of exaggeration in advertising.”

Or, as Adler puts it: “Nobody can tell a teen-ager what to do.”

Unless that teen-ager attends a parochial school. On a recent weekday, as packs of adolescents roamed Northridge Fashion Center--many with credit card-carrying mothers in tow--Tony Waree browsed through games at a computer store. Unlike most of his peers, Tony exists beyond the influence of fashion.

“I go to Alemany. We have uniforms,” the 16-year-old Arleta student said. “If you wear anything different, they make you go home.”