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Whenever I watch a film, no matter what the negative or positive qualities of the picture may be, I try to pick up some kind of message from the movie.

For example, when I came out of the theater after having watched M. Night Shyamalan’s sorry excuse for a film, Signs, the lesson I gleaned was this: If you are the director and writer of a high budget Hollywood film, you can finagle yourself into having a grossly extended cameo with ridiculous amounts of dialogue and needless characterizations of your own portrayal.

Like the movies I watch, my two years at UCLA have conferred upon me many lessons, both academic and social. Many will no doubt decry me a counter-hegemonic naysayer or a cynic at best, but I can not help but notice that UCLA is a very pretentious place to be.

Seriously, the cash spent on smoked clubber-kid sunglasses, trendy-super-faded denim jeans and Diesel apparel on this campus rivals the gross national product of Bhutan.

Or what about the emo-punk rock style, with a thrift store look at Saks 5th Avenue prices? It seems exceedingly counterintuitive to me when you pay a premium to look ratty.

Try to understand where I’m coming from. I grew up in a fairly affluent neighborhood, right by the Rose Bowl, so I know conspicuous consumption when I see it. But at our hallowed institution, people have taken pretentious poserism to a whole new level.

Granted, I’m sure there are many other forms of pretension, namely academic but also societal, class-based and religious, that I can explore in great detail. I only find that fashion is the easiest way to illustrate how UCLA’s constituents take these styles far beyond the realm of personal satisfaction and enter into the domain of advertising.

My best friend and I came up with a non-ordinal and somewhat capricious formula to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to differentiating pompous people from the rest of society.

Simply put, if people are “advertising” – that is, dressing or acting a certain way to attract attention rather than for personal pleasure – they are clowns and are thus pretentious. People who actually dress a certain way for personal pleasure are “down for their cause.”

Yes, the theory is the cornerstone, but much groundwork is also needed for me to ascertain whether aficionados of popular styles are advertisers or just down for their cause.

I’ve found it very helpful to look at these people’s stances, especially their faces, when walking or sometimes strutting around campus. In my experience, I’ve found advertisers to exhibit permanent smirks on their faces, as if to bellow “We condescend to YOUUUU”.

Furthermore, their gaits are almost always jauntier and they tend to take up more space as if to say to their academic brethren, “Behold, look upon my fashion quotient and tremble!”

Finally, quite arguably the least describable, yet most important attribute one will find in advertisers is the question, “Do they look like they’re trying too hard?” Predictably, the advertisers usually evoke a positive response.

There will invariably be some who are extremely into fashion, those who care little for such things and many who populate the middle ground. Still, in conducting an informal survey of the “advertisers” to “down for their causers’ ratio,” I’ve ascertained UCLA’s population of pretentious advertisers to be quite high.

Whether it’s the prestige of the university they attend, the close proximity of glamorous Los Angeles, or another cause, the high population of advertisers at UCLA chafes on my social psyche like a pair of ill-fitting boxer shorts.

I submit a fervent plea to the hordes of advertisers at UCLA. Please, if you’re going to be sporting these trendy clothes and accessories, do me a favor and lose the pretentious attitude.

Fashion sense of the true “down for their cause” variety should be born of personal taste and self-satisfaction, not derived from constant attempts to one-up and condescend to those who do not dress like you.

Advertisers, I entreat you to repent of your pretentious ways and embrace the doctrine of those who are simply “down for their cause.”