Fashion magazines, blogs, and consultants have said before that what we wear says a lot about who we are as people. Fashion expresses who we are, including our personality and identity through things like the colors, cuts, designs, and logo of clothes and accessories. However, there is much more to this argument than a simple explanation as to why your favorite color is your favorite. Fashion Psychologists Carolyn Mair writes in her book, The Psychology of Fashion that, “interpretations of the psychological meaning of clothing are influenced not only by the wearer but also by the observer, as well as by the social and cultural context.”
Mair calls clothing our “second skin”, it sits so close to our bodies it becomes part of our identity. The clothes, shoes, perfume, and other fashion articles all connect with our brains using our senses like touch, and vision. It’s sometimes forgotten about how other senses too create the connections we have to our waredromes like the smell of things like perfume and leather, and the sounds of clacking high heels, or rustling of skirts and jackets. The way the brain perceives these sensory stimulants also factors into the way the articles of clothing make us feel, or the “psychological phenomena of perception” (Mair). Any experience or effect that makes an impression on the brain has a psychological effect.
Clothing style can convey things like character, sociability, competence, intelligence, and other social things like gender and sexual orientation. It also can be used as a way to enhance self-esteem and career opportunities. It is a way of conversation between people, but everyone interprets it differently because communicating, especially non-verbally is difficult. That’s why clothing means different things to different people, but also is how sometimes the ideas behind the clothing are misinterpreted.
Dawnn Karen, a brand consultant, therapist, and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology gave examples of examining the ‘why’ behind your clothing choices to learn about yourself to the New York Times and is quoted saying:
“One client is a widow who continued to buy black clothing two years after her husband’s death. ‘She didn’t know that she was doing it,’ Ms. Karen said. ‘And I thought, ‘Why aren’t you aware?’ Addressing that ‘why’ helped the client work through her grief.”
For Karen, clothing became an armor for her, after being assaulted by someone close to her, Karen says, “‘The next day, I went to my closet and said, ‘O.K., I’ve got to look good.’ I put on something elaborate and fashionable. I remember going to class with these huge feather earrings I’d made. Every day, I used clothes to heal myself.’”
Clothing even affects our own self-objectification. The 2014 study, “Dress, body and self: research in the social psychology of dress” by Johnson, Lennon, and Rudd, tested how women rated themselves trying on a swimsuit versus a sweater, and all of the women rated the sweater better, but there was no difference for men. Then they took a math test in the clothing and those wearing the swimsuits did worse than those wearing the sweater, for both men and women.
The same study also mentions other research on colors and how people are perceived. This color association was connected to the uniforms of sports teams that dress their players in black being perceived as more aggressive and received more penalties than when they wore different colors. Interestingly, the players themselves also played more aggressively when wearing black than other colors like white. So while clothing has “symbolic meaning for the wearer, it also affects the wearer’s behavior,” like how wearing glasses when taking a test makes you feel smarter even if it doesn’t affect your performance, or how people have their “lucky test-taking socks” (here’s the original study on this concept too for reference).
Even the action of shopping is something that has been studied within psychology. People who are addicted to shopping overspend on clothes they don’t need, but for many the action of shopping is an emotional release. It brings joy and it’s often a fun social event. I know even for myself, going to the mall just to shop, even if I don’t buy anything, has always been a stress reliever for me. Even now, my roommate and I set goals for ourselves saying once we pay rent we can go buy that one thing we’ve had our eyes on for a while.
A common concept for looking at your own closet and seeing what it says about you is to pull out your favorite items, you know which ones they are. Why are you choosing these pieces, what about them makes them your favorite? Are they comfortable, meaningful? Look at the colors of your favorite pieces, is there a common color?
In general, there is a widely accepted 80/20 rule (the Pareto Principle), meaning that 80% of your texts/phone calls come from the same 20% of your contacts, 80% of the wealth is held by 20% of the population, and so on. The same goes with your closet. You really only wear 20% of your closet 80% of the time. There a lots of blogs on the internet about how to go through your closet to narrow your wardrobe down to only the things that you want to wear consistently, with the most common of them being changing the hanger direction for the clothes you wear and eventually you’ll see the ones that you never wear because they’re on the backwards hangers.
Many researchers and psychologists agree that psychology can help people learn about their habits, but also it can help the industry shift to being more sustainable and promoting lifestyles that are better for their consumers. People will choose something that’s better for themselves and the world, but only if they have the options and the options are comparable to each other. For some other really interesting interviews and research check out this and this!
Clothing also means more to people than just something to wear. Clothing holds memories, comfort, and helps make up people’s identities. While a t-shirt in your closet may just seem like a t-shirt for you, there’s a reason why you only wear those two t-shirts and then put the others back in the drawer unable to get rid of them. The reasons behind your clothes are unique to you though, colors don’t mean one thing, the same as cuts, designs, logos, and other aspects of your clothes.
What your brain associates and thinks about your clothes though is deeply personal to you. Fashion psychology isn’t meant to tell you how to think, or even to say that things only mean one thing, but it’s there to help you look at your choices and understand why you make them.
