THE JOURNAL
Illustration by Mr Adam Nickel
In this life, you end up being one of two people. You are either a believer who considers “new year, new me” to be less of a cutesy phrase and more of a solemn vow, who never fails to pump out a list of resolutions with a whispered promise that this year will be different. Or you’re a sceptic. You think any promise of rapid self-improvement is nothing short of a farce – snake oil dusted in the leftover confetti of new year hopefulness.
These days, with all of this – gestures vaguely into the atmosphere – going on, it is easy to be a sceptic. But what if I told you that the believers were right all along? That it is possible to dress your way into a new mindset, a new career, a new sense of self and not in a “we’re not selling clothes, we’re selling dreams” marketer kind of way, but in a “this is all backed up by scientific research” kind of way.
01.
The mind-clothes connection
Cast your mind back to 2012, a time when you didn’t have to talk about your life “pre” or “post” anything. Your favourite rapper waxed lyrical about frolicking in Paris and not about hateful conspiracy theories, and two psychologists changed the way we look at clothes for ever. Professors Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky proved the existence of a mind-clothes connection with little more than a handful of white coats and a dream.
Their experiment required participants to complete a series of attention tests while wearing a white coat. Half the participants were told they were wearing doctors’ coats, while the other half were told they were wearing painters’ smocks. The results revealed that when participants believed they were wearing a doctor’s coat, they performed significantly better in the tests. This result prompted Adam and Galinsky to coin the term “enclothed cognition”, which describes “the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes”.
The doctors’ white coats influenced the participants’ performance because, unbeknown to us, certain clothes trigger psychological schemas that bring their symbolic meanings to the surface. Think of psychological schemas like mini Wikipedia pages that we store in our minds. These pages condense vast amounts of information, which we then use to help us act appropriately in different situations. Each page relating to people includes information about their behaviour, appearance, attitude, etc.
Slight variations may exist from person to person, but a doctor conjures similar results for most people, such as “wears a white coat”, “is methodical” and “is attentive”. So, when we wear clothes that evoke these mental Wiki pages, we internalise or “embody” them, which comes out in the way we think and act. Essentially, your brain goes, “The person who dresses like this is attentive. I’m wearing it, so I must also be attentive, so let me pay attention.”
With this study, Adam and Galinsky proved the existence of a mind-clothes connection, but if some of you sceptics remain unconvinced, the proof doesn’t stop there.
02.
Superhero costumes make you stronger
In 2014, the psychologist Professor Karen Pine found that when people wore a Superman T-shirt as opposed to a plain one, the heroic emblem impacted how they viewed their abilities. The effect of enclothed cognition caused them to assume that they possessed some of Superman’s strength and could physically lift heavier weights.
03.
Formal styles make you ready for business
A study in the journal of Social Psychological And Personality Science revealed that students who considered themselves more formally dressed than their peers could adopt a “better holistic view” of the world. They were more likely to engage in abstract thinking and more likely to reach their long-term goals.
Psychologists also discovered that those dressed casually tended to use more casual words, such as “easy-going” and “nonchalant”, to describe themselves. Formally dressed people tended to describe themselves using formal words such as “strategic”, “neat” and “tolerant”.
04.
Wearing counterfeits makes you a fraud
Researchers investigating the deceptive costs of counterfeits asked a group of participants to wear expensive sunglasses while completing some experiments. Half of them were told the sunglasses were genuine. The other half were told they were fakes. The participants who were told they were wearing fake designer sunglasses were more prone to cheat in subsequent lab experiments involving cash payouts. The researchers concluded that “counterfeit glasses increase unethical behaviour by making their wearers feel less authentic”.
05.
Dressing hot to avoid the cold
The world may think of Cardi B as a superstar rapper, but I consider her more of an amateur fashion psychologist. Clearly, she was signalling the varsity of enclothed cognition when she uttered the phrase “a hoe never gets cold” in a video that went viral.
Researchers from the University of South Florida interviewed a series of women wearing their best party dresses outside a club on a freezing night. They discovered that women who engaged in self-objectification (when you internalise harmful tropes, for example scantily clad dressers are less valuable) reportedly felt less cold than women with low self-objectification.
While many people (and by this I mean me) think these dresses can be empowering, if you think the opposite and still choose to wear them, you can end up dehumanising yourself to the point where you become disconnected from your feelings, both emotionally and, in this case, physically.
06.
Beyond the white coat
Clothes are a criminally overlooked tool for self-transformation that can yield solid results, but a rise in collective scepticism has prevented us from believing that. With my book, Big Dress Energy, I wanted to open people’s eyes to the ways, both good and bad, that they experience enclothed cognition in their daily lives. My goal is to help everyone wield the power of clothes more intentionally.
When you get dressed, think about what you want to embody. Is it authority, power, fitness, romance or perhaps something else? Next, identify the associated styles and people who automatically come to mind. Then head over to your wardrobe. What do you own that you associate with these traits?
If you don’t own anything, do some mindful shopping and add these items to your collection. Your clothes are too powerful for them simply to look good. You should dress in a way that helps make life a little bit easier this new year and beyond.