Identity? Pul-LEEZE.

"Shhh, do you know you're actually yelling?" my wife said to me.
Well, no, I didn't realize I was. But I guess I'm not surprised. Every once in a while, I hear something on television that pisses me off.

In Delcambre, Louisiana, it is now a crime to wear baggy pants that expose your underwear. The penalty is six months in jail and up to a $500 fine.

That wasn't what pissed me off. Granted, the punishment's a bit harsh, but then again, if you want to look like somebody who's in jail, maybe you belong there yourself.
No, what pissed me off was some talking head getting onscreen and saying "this is no big deal to youth. It's fashion. They're...
(oh, shit, here it comes, he's actually going to say it!)
...searching for their identity."
Cue the boiling of the blood.

Searching for their identity? Why do so many adults say this about teenagers? Straight out of the southern end of yonder bull, that is. Teens--most of them, at any rate--have zero interest in their own identities. If they did, they wouldn't all look the same, now, would they?

Believe me, I know this from personal experience, being one of those kids who existed on the outside of every inside there ever was. You're punished for daring to assert your own identity. You're punished even more harshly if you try to fit in, say, by wearing whatever label is "in" this year, which presents a pretty little conundrum for kids like me.
Being a teenager hasn't changed much. On the surface, it's changed a lot, of course. Once upon a time, there was no need for "grief counsellors" whenever trauma befell your school; it was assumed you knew, by the age of thirteen, what death was and could probably cope with it on your own. Then, for a time, they brought in the grief counsellors for everything, "traumatic" or not--and street racers getting killed isn't traumatic, it's Darwin at work. (Street racers killing others, mind you...)
They're still trying with the grief counsellors, but teens are overwhelmingly rejecting them in favour of Facebook. Which probably strikes the adult mind as utterly bizarre. I can only reiterate what I've said about online relationships: it's very easy to feel very close to a great many people online. There's something about a screen that encourages the baring of one's soul.

Digression aside, the teenage tightrope hasn't changed, at root. Adults can say it's a search for identity--they say it often enough that most teens will agree with them--but it's really a search for conformity and approval. For some reason that escaped me at the time (even as I tried like hell to fit in), it's seen as positively vital that you win the approval of your peers. The approval of your parents is probably a worthier goal to shoot for, particularly when your peers are up to no good. But just try saying that to a teenager. You'd better start running halfway through the sentence.
Maybe that's why I couldn't fit in. God knows I tried. I went through a period in grade nine and ten when pretty much everything I wore was an exact copy of something I'd seen someone else, someone cool, wearing. My outward appearance was therefore passable, but inside I was always rebelling...against the groupthink so common and so demanded. That gave me the mark of Cain as far as most of my peers were concerned.

If baggy pants had been "the fashion" when I was in high school, I do believe my parents would have enforced a different fashion on me. Not that they would have had to, of course. Why would I wear something that doesn't fit? Isn't that the first thing you need to concern yourself with when it comes to clothing, at least if you want to look respectable?

That's just it, though. These kids don't want to look respectable, at least not in the sense adults mean when they say the term. The whole nature of "respect" has changed, probably irrevocably. Respect is no longer earned, for one thing: it's expected. Teens have taken the old-fashioned notion of respect and infused a great deal of fear: to disrespect someone, say, by looking at them wrong, looking at them at all, or maybe not looking at them, can get you killed. It's up to you to determine the correct protocol.
In short, teenhood has taken on a prison mentality. I'm not sure how or why this happened, or if it can be changed. But we probably shouldn't be surprised that teens want to look like convicted felons.