You may have heard that you are the way you dress, or ‘clothes make the man’. Whether it’s a snazzy tailored suit or a casual printed top from the likes of
CustomThread.com, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you wear can literally paint a picture of you as a person, and science itself says so.
Clothes Paint a Picture of How You Think and Act
In her book
You Are What You Wear: What Your Clothes Reveal About You, clinical psychologist Dr. Jennifer Baumgartner explains how our
psychology determines our clothing choices. She also writes about how important psychological issues can be brought about by our own wardrobe in our daily lives, or even in the workplace.
Dr. Baumgartner contends that shopping and spending behaviors are often the result of internal motivations. These can include social culture, experiences, and emotions. She also argues that a good number of people rely on clothing as some sort of a social indicator, since there’s no official social status indicator or caste system anymore. And it works, since you can look around and easily separate an affluent individual from a rag-tag commoner.
They Can Remind you How Much You’ve Changed through the Years
At times, clothing can even remind us of how fortunate we can be.
The Guardian contributor Barbara Brownie recalls how her great uncle, present during a terrorist raid in the British Embassy,
holds on to a bullet-pierced jacket as a memento from the fateful event. After such an event, clothes can be considered a piece of personal archaeology — one that serves as evidence of personal development. And it’s easy to see why. Everyone undergoes changes in wardrobe preferences through the years, and if you try to collect every piece you’ve owned since you were young, you’ll get a grand sense of how you’ve progressed as a person.
Clothes Can Even Make You Do Better
A study from Northwestern University had scientists stumbling upon a concept called ‘enclothed’ cognition. It is defined by the researchers as the influence that clothes have on a wearer’s psychological makeup. Two different groups of study participants were given lab coats, but each group didn’t have them the same way. One group was told that the coats were that of a doctor’s, while the other was told that the coat was a painter’s smock. Members of the former were observed to be more careful and attentive than their counterparts, indicating that their behaviors were influenced by their clothing.
In the typical office setup, it’s largely the same thing. Since people associate a suit-and-tie outfit with professionalism, it is claimed that wearing such attire to the workplace increases performance. A study published in the
American Economic Review backs this up, concluding that merely looking sharp can allow one to earn about 5 percent more than the average person.
With the information stated beforehand, it may indeed be true that clothes do tie in closely to one’s personality, either by exhibiting or influencing it. Maybe now’s the time to get your wardrobe choices straight and go on not just looking sharp, but performing excellently as well.
