Dress Like the Person You Want to Be
How you dress is, to a great extent, how you are.
When I was five or six years old and playing with my friend Harriet at her parents’ house, I somehow managed to find myself in a very pretty yellow dress. This was one of those moments in my life when, to borrow from Graham Greene, I threw the door open and let the future in. All kinds of subsequent experiences, some of which would make your hair curl, can be traced back to that afternoon, my recollection of which sticks out in my memory like a polaroid dangling from a string. From time to time I unclip this picture to study it. It never fails to strike me as amusing that the irredeemable, incorrigible, impenitent transvestite part of my selfhood began here. With a yellow dress.
What does it mean to dress? I do not think this is a silly question. To dress, evidently, is to put on clothing; but our reasons for doing so go beyond mere utility. To dress is to make a conscious choice to present ourselves to the world in a certain way. Every time we pull on those jeans, or button up that shirt, or slip into that dress, we are preparing to engage in a conversation with society, with ourselves, and with the time in which we live. Getting dressed is a deeply meaningful act that shapes the world and shapes us.
Now, we all, for the most part, conform to social norms. We conceal, as it were, our modesty; and though we may notice our differences in dress more than our similarities, there are basic shared categories of clothing that can be found on any clothing website. (It will now take me all of my willpower not to spend several hours longingly browsing through the latest sales on ASOS.) Tops, shorts, skirts, trousers, jackets, dresses, sweatshirts, jumpers — despite the diversity that exists within these categories, the categories themselves, and the combination of categories, mark them out as Western. We do not usually see in Western clothing shops, or on Western streets, the kaftan, the sari, the dhoti, the kurta or the poncho. So even when I slip into my favourite dress and pair of heels, put on some makeup and go out for cocktails with a friend, I am, in one sense, conforming to social norms—as strange as that may seem.
Though we may notice our differences in dress more than our similarities, there are basic shared categories of clothing.
Sometimes, these norms are more strictly defined. And generally speaking the stricter they are, the greater (in theory) the sense of cohesion those norms should bring about. Schoolchildren wear a uniform. Football teams wear a kit. In Orwell’s 1984, the sorry drudges of the dystopian Airstrip One all wear overalls (a nod, by the way, not just to the Party’s effort to iron out every crease of individuality, but to affirm utility as a high ethical aim). This points to the role that dress codes play in subduing the ego. When we go to a wedding, or the opera, we are limited in the extent to which we can express ourselves through our clothing. This turns the audience into a presentable and undistracting mass, and turns our attention to the key players.
But to conform is not to eliminate all self-expression. In fact, like all forms of constraint, it can generate creativity. Style is not breaking the rules; anyone can do that. To walk down the street dressed in a completely arbitrary, clownish ensemble is not stylish. To break the rules judiciously with, say, a pocket square, or a certain kind of fabric, or a statement necklace, or a specific cut, is. We must know the rules in order to break them. ‘Without tradition, originality cannot exist,’ wrote Sir Roger Scruton, agreeing with a point made by T.S. Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. ‘For it is only against a tradition that it becomes perceivable.’ To put it another way, style can only manifest in the context of convention.
Dressing remains an art form. ‘One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art,’ wrote Oscar Wilde. Before him there was ‘Beau’ Brummell, the first dandy and the arbiter of British men’s fashion before and during the reign of King George IV, with whom he was a close friend. Brummell, far from choosing bright and showy clothing, preferred fitted, tailored, understated bespoke clothing, ushering in an era in fashion known as the Great Male Renunciation. (To this day, the British suit is viewed as more sober and subtle than its louder counterpart in Italy or the United States, where the surrounding culture has given rise to a no less beautiful but very different kind of formal attire.) We may express ourselves, or a part or parts of ourselves, through the colours, textures and styles we choose to wear.
Brummell, far from choosing bright and showy clothing, preferred fitted, tailored, understated bespoke clothing.
Psychologists speak of ‘enclothed cognition’, which deals with the influence that clothing has on its wearer’s thoughts and behaviour. In a 2012 study, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinksy proposed the symbolic meaning of our clothes and our wearing of them alter, and not all that subtly, how we are. Students in the study performed significantly better on a task if they were wearing a scientist’s white lab coat. Interestingly, in a further study, students wearing a lab coat performed better even if the group against which they were measured wrote an essay beforehand about how they ‘identified’ with the lab coat. Those who had written the essay performed better than students who were wearing a classic painter’s coat. In other words, the enclothed effect was stronger than that which came about from mere priming. We make an association between clothing, its typical wearer and the traits of that wearer.
Further studies confirmed this. A 2015 paper concluded that those who wear formal business attire think more abstractly, and a 2014 study suggested those who wear informal clothing in negotiations will make less money (they also show a lower testosterone level) than those who dress up a bit. Colours change things, too. It was found in 2004 that a fighter in red could lift heavier weight than his counterpart in blue, even though they belonged to the same weight category. And when women were told their expensive sunglasses were fake, they cheated more on lab experiments and became more paranoid about the behaviour of other women. The perceived authenticity of our clothing matters.
Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, thanks Rusticus in his Meditations for the lessons he learned from him, one of which is ‘Not to dress up just to stroll around the house’. Perhaps, given that he was a Stoic, he sought to cultivate humility in the home by wearing plain clothing, or avoid letting society’s aesthetic standards creep into his personal space so he became true to himself. Or perhaps he was simply acknowledging that what we wear changes how we are, and in a way, who we are.
