Mind what you wear … because it could change your life.

We spend billions of pounds on clothes annually, so surely the cry 'I don’t know what to wear!’ should never be heard. Yet it is. 

A wardrobe crisis may seem like a minor dilemma in a day packed with important decisions, but it's actually not frivolous. Because the clothes we choose can shape the day ahead, determining who we meet, how we behave and how others react to us. No wonder the psychology of fashion is so fascinating.

That’s why my new book ‘Mind What You Wear’ helps you understand the impact of what you wear, on yourself.

Because clothing can literally be life-changing.

Mind What You Wear is just £1.99 from Amazon UK

The book includes the story of Meg who, on a whim, bought a hat, that made a man approach her at a party, that led to them marrying. It’s a poignant  reminder of how our apparently insignifcant choices have a huge impact on others. And where that can lead.

But the main focus of the book is on how what we wear changes us too.

We walk taller and act more confidently in the right outfit. When we’re dressed down we withdraw and hide away. Clothes speak to others but they have the power to speak to us too. Sensations and associations in the body lead to new ideas in the mind.

Every day we pull something from the wardrobe, or try on something in a store, that has life-changing potential. 

 - The suit that subliminally convinces an interviewer we’re perfect for the job. 

 - The red dress that stirs something in a future lover that leads them to ask for a date. 

 - Even the swimsuit that can strip us of our intellectual powers. 

(Yes, when Barbara Fredrickson gave a maths test to groups of women and men who wore either a swimsuit or a sweater, she showed that wearing a swimsuit diminished a woman’s maths performance).

This was a startling discovery - that what we wear can actually change the way our brains function. Later, researchers from Northwestern University in the US showed that putting on a white coat improved a person’s mental agility. By associating the white coat with a doctor their brain was primed to take on different mental capacities.

So in my lab we have been putting students in Superman t-shirts! We’ve found it makes them see themselves as more likeable and superior to other students, and even to believe they are physically stronger. Every day the brain’s functions are primed by sights, smells and experiences. Now we know our mental processes can also primed by a piece of clothing, which opens up exciting opportunities.

What we wear has cognitive, social and emotional consequences. 

The right clothing can change who we are, how we think and how we feel. So we should never underestimate this power. My research has revealed that when women are depressed they are more likely to wear jeans. What would happen if, on waking up feeling glum, instead of dragging on the sad pants the woman pulled on a favourite frock? The effect could be intrapersonal, priming her brain and lifting her mood. Or it could be interpersonal, the message her clothes send to the world determining others’ responses to her, triggering a positive feedback loop capable of changing her mood. 

The book has lots of tips to lift your mood with the right clothes. 

One day we may even see clothes prescribed as therapy, as an alternative to medication. In the meantime why not learn a little more about how the right clothes can impact on your life by getting hold of a copy of Mind What You Wear.

What's your Style Identity? (and should you care?)….

A pair of turquoise PVC shorts. A neon jumpsuit. A hand-knitted corset. Just some of the drastic style boobs that three friends owned up to when surveyed recently. And who hasn’t bought something to wear and, on getting it home, found that it's less of a ‘Wow” and more of a “Why???”!

That’s why I was thrilled to get involved in a project with TKMaxx and The Times T2 to help people discover their Style Identity. It's just launched today. 

When we're muddled about what suits us, confused about the style that matches our personality, we risk making expensive mistakes and creating a look that misses the mark. It's not enough to rip a style from the catwalk, magazine page or shop window and simply put it on. That look was designed for someone with a different body, a different personality and a lifestyle that’s nothing like yours. So it’s unlikely to work. It might scream, “This isn’t me”. Worse still, it could hide the real you and leave you sartorially dissatisfied, starved of self-expression. That's why dressing from the inside out, from your identity and your unique personality, is so vital.

Research shows that when we change how we look, the change isn’t purely physical. 

Changing how we look changes how we behave. 

It changes how others react to us (positively and negatively). 

It can even change how we think and feel. 

So pulling a dress off the wardrobe or shop rail is no benign act. It could have a knock-on effect for your whole day. Or even your life. I’m digging deep into the psychology behind this in my new book about fashion psychology, ‘Mind What You Wear’. It'll feature the TKMaxx/Times Style Identity questionnaire as a way for people to really get ‘behind the seams’ of their own identity. 

Romance, Retro, Glamour, Bold or Street Chic. What's your style identity?

If you haven’t already checked out yours, go over and do the Style Identity questionnaire. It only takes a few minutes. And don’t forget to share your results with your friends. 

I've created five identities based on how an individual's personality type and lifestyle translates into clothing. The identities are Romance, Retro, Glamour, Bold and Street Chic. Your answers to the questions will reveal which you are. You may think you know. Or you might be in for a surprise. Of course most of us are a mix of types, so your signature and your accent style will emerge from the test. It’s worth giving it a go. When you know what your style is you feel more at one with your image, and those shopping expeditions are made a whole lot easier.

If discovering your identity sparks off some style soul-searching, that’s no bad thing. 
TK Maxx has a fashion philosophy that’s all about being a little bit braver. They want people to ‘put their brave glasses on’. To say ‘maybe’ to the unthinkable. I love their approach because it chimes so well with the Do Something Different movement that I co-founded and passionately believe in. When applied to fashion this all adds up to more brazen experimentation, more pushing at the boudaries and more venturing across the familiar line.

It’s easy to get into a wardrobe rut because it creeps up on us without us knowing. You suddenly find yourself playing it so safe that you're not expressing your true identity. You  start to disappear in a sea of beige. Now's the time to change all that.
TK Maxx say that the only wrong is not trying it on. 
And that’s as true of life as it is of clothing!

Counting the cost of fast fashion

This fascinating article touches on fashion psychology and was originally published in The Conversation

By Alice Payne, Queensland University of Technology

There’s a polyester mullet skirt gracing a derrière near you. It’s short at the front, long at the back, and it’s also known as the hi-lo skirt.  Like fads that preceded it, the mullet skirt has a short fashion life, and although it will remain potentially wearable for years, it’s likely to soon be heading to the charity shop or to landfill.

The mullet skirt may not last more than a couple of months as a fad, but the fast-fashion trend has shown considerably more longevity.  With Spanish brand Zara compressing lead times to as little as 13 days, and the UK’s Topshop releasing 300 new styles a week, fashion trends are being captured and sold far quicker than ever before.

Catwalk styles can become high street fashion within weeks. AAP

In Australia, although Zara and Topshop only arrived in 2011, many local retailers have been following an accelerated fashion cycle since the early 2000s. Valleygirl releases 65 new styles per week, Supre has daily deliveries, and the mid-market Witchery boasts 400 new styles per month.

Fast fashion has enabled a democratic engagement with the luxury of constant novelty, once only the domain of the very wealthy. Now high fashion trends are instantly accessible online, and the physical garments are for sale at prices which have never been lower.

However, the garment’s price tag does not acknowledge the environmental and social cost of overconsumption.

In the UK, some 30 kilograms of textile products, per person, per year go to landfill. What isn’t sent to landfill goes to charity. A single Smith Family sorting centre in New South Wales sorts 10000 tonnes of donated clothing each year. Much of this will be sent to developing countries, a trade that can be disruptive to local textile industries.

Cotton requires a large amount of water to grow – but often ends in landfill. AAP

The two most popular fibres for fashion apparel – cotton and polyester – each have considerable ecological impacts in production. Conventional cotton alone accounts for one quarter of global pesticide use, linked to poisonings and air and groundwater contamination. In addition, cotton requires a global average of 11,000 litres of water per kilogram, to produce.

With a world population of seven billion, and a projected nine billion by 2050, food security and water security will become increasingly pressing policy concerns. The volatility of cotton prices in 2010/11 is possibly a foretaste of this, with cotton prices rising to their highest level in the history of the New York Stock Exchange.

The launch of Spanish retailer Zara in Australia has seen lead times compressed to a mere 13 days. AAP

Australian fast-fashion retailers face additional short-term challenges. In 2011, bricks-and-mortar retail was at its lowest ebb in Australia since 1962, and across the fast fashion market, clothing was reduced up to 70%. Local labels are affected by the rising fibre prices (not only cotton but polyester of cotton quality) and rising Chinese manufacturing costs. The forthcoming carbon price may also lead to rises in the cost of freight and raw materials. In addition, a greater number of consumers are choosing to buy clothing online from cheaper overseas e-tailers.

Australian designers and retailers can adapt to these challenges through examining the garment life cycle to identify points of intervention. For example, more efficient use of resources would see disposable faddish items such as the mullet skirt collected at end-of-life for closed-loop recycling, in which its polyester can become feedstock for new textiles. (See Kate Fletcher and Matchilda Tham’s Lifetimes project, or Patagonia’s Common Threads program.)

Crucially, fast fashion is not merely fast material throughput of garments, but a sophisticated global image and information system which, to some degree, is weightless. As fashion is intangible, it is not necessarily tethered to the purchase of new clothing. An example is The Uniform Project, in which blogger Sheena Matheiken wore the same dress for a year, styled in 365 different ways.  With this perspective, a fast-fashion company’s role may evolve into that of a service provider, not simply a retailer. These services may include styling advice, alterations, clothing libraries or collection of the garment at end-of-life.




In Australia, Supre and Sportsgirl have followed the lead of Topshop and American Apparel in offering a small selection of vintage clothing alongside their new stock.

There is no contradiction in fast-fashion retailers selling second-hand clothing, as the speed of trends mean that styles come in and out of fashion so frequently that some version of “vintage” style is always in style. Within the context of fast fashion as ‘post-brand’, second-hand styles simply become additional grist for the mill, as consumers will mix and remix the product (of whatever provenance) in their personal, restless search for novelty and individuality.

Fast-fashion principles also drive the success of online marketplaces such as eBay, in which second-hand clothing can be circulated again and again, revalourised by individual consumers. Similarly, the Salvos charity stores in Australia and Oxfam in the UK, now sell second-hand fashion online, grouped into ‘lookbooks’, complete with fashion shoots.

While the Rococo excess of a new frock a week may be unsustainable, a different fast fashion – one that relies less on overconsumption of new garments and more on the inventive reuse of existing materials – can emerge.
Alice Payne does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
          Read the original article.
       

What that 'red dress' symbolises: The psychology of fashion.

The dress sends many signals that explain why this image went viral. (Image: Reuters)

The image above, currently circulating on the internet, shouts fashion psychology more than people realise.

It’s of a young woman in a red dress being sprayed with tear gas by a policeman during the Istanbul riots. I have just come back from Istanbul (where I work in the fashion department at Bilgi University) and I was struck by the multitude of messages in this simple, momentary image. This is what fashion psychology can tell us:

Red and white outfit. Red and white flag.

First it’s not just a woman in a dress. It’s a woman in a red dress. And she’s carrying a white shoulder bag. This colour combination mimics that found on the Turkish flag. So this image will have a more powerful, albeit subliminal, impact on Turkish people at this time.

The woman's outfit echoes the Turkish flag:
more than mere coincidence?

Red for fertility

Secondly, the red dress has more resonance than any other colour. As well as being the colour of passion and love, red is the symbol of female fertility. In many species redness conveys that the female is ready to mate. So the image packs another punch; this young, fertile female is the mother of the next generation, of the future of Turkey.

Flared waist and fertility

Look at the style of the dress too. It isn’t a shift or a smock. It flares from the waist. This emphasises the women’s waist-to-hip ratio, which is about 0.7. That's the ratio that, on women, has been shown to correlate strongly with fertility.

Had she worn a blue dress, or a t-shirt and jeans, this image would not have been so powerful. Nor would it, I suspect have gone viral around the globe.

Dress choice is shaped by unconscious forces

This woman was largely unaware of the power of what she was wearing. Just as most of us are when we reach into our closets every day.  When she chose her red dress and grabbed her white bag that morning, it could have been a mere coincidence. But unconscious forces may have been at work too. We don't always understand why we wear what we wear, but our choices are rarely accidental. And they will be psychologically motivated. 

The masked man in black

And what about the guy firing tear gas at her? Research shows that his black uniform will have made him more likely to behave aggressively. His masked face will have reduced his sense of personal accountability. It will have lowered his threshold for expressing inhibited behaviours. By hiding behind his anonymity he was able to unleash his aggression on her. Was he drawn to her because of what she was wearing? It's possible. Although we do know from the indiscriminate firing of tear gas at protestors that she certainly wasn’t singled out for this treatment.

More than meets the eye

Yet the image stands out not just because of the appalling actions it depicts. The strong visual imagery reaches deep within us too. We look at it and we process the action in the photograph at a conscious level. But unconsciously the signals in the characters' clothing also have intensely powerful emotional resonance for us.

It's tempting to dismiss fashion as mere fluff. Until, that is, we start to decode its many meanings and marvel at what it reveals.

Be part of the science

TAKE PART IN CURRENT PSYCHO-FASHION RESEARCH 


IF YOU HAVE A SPARE TEN MINUTES WHY NOT COMPLETE THIS SURVEY INTO YOUR THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS .... AND YOUR WARDROBE ... ?


SURVEY HERE

Do women dress for men - or women?

So, apparently, women spend almost £84,000 on clothes in their lifetime. 
And they are dressing more seductively in the economic downturn to increase their chances of nabbing that rare thing, a man with a decent job.

Or that’s the spin that the Daily Mail put on a recent study to come out of Texas Christian University.

As if it was really that simple, that women just dress to impress men.

In an earlier blog I did point out that high heels force women to adopt a posture reminiscent of randy babboons and, sure, that’s all about appearing seductive. 
But women who expose too much flesh can actually be harming their career prospects.
I still find the enclothed cognition argument compelling, i.e. that women dress to impress themselves, since certain clothes make them feel better, give them confidence and lift their mood (even if there’s not a man in sight).

Clearly it’s complicated. There seem to be three factors at work:

1.    Evolutionary psychologists have shown us that clothing sends out all kinds of sexual signals (red for fertility, high heels for fecundity). This is the ‘women dress to attract men’ argument.

2.    Then there’s the function of clothes for emotional regulation, which is born out by my research showing that women select clothes accord to their moods. This could be seen as the ‘women dress for themselves’ argument.

3.    There’s a third factor too. It’s the ‘women dress for other women’ point of view.  Take a look at this:

Letter from a popular Sunday newspaper supplement.

£600 for a scarf? What credit crunch? 
That aside, could it be that women dress to get one over on the competition as this letter suggests? 

Blogger Nikolas Lloyd thinks yes (and has kindly allowed me to quote his theory here):

Imagine a society in which there are not very many women around who are available. Such a society was the one in which we evolved. In the world of the forager, a potential mate came along seldom, and one usually only had a small selection of women from which to choose a life partner. In this society, a woman who had known the local men for ages and was on good terms with them, was very nice, but perhaps not the best looking or a little bit past her prime, might lose out to some slip of a thing who walked out of the forest. A foreign woman might out-compete all the local women, even if she hardly spoke the language, if she was young and pretty, and this would not please the local women. What could these women do to keep the stranger out? Well, just as language seems to have evolved partly to keep out outsiders (a human who has learned a language as an adult will almost never fully master it and pass as a local), so too could fashion. The local women could make it next to impossible for the foreigner to pass as a local, and become accepted in society, by coming up with many arbitrary and subtle rules of fashion.

So Lloyd thinks women dress in a way that helps them fit in with their social group and keep out intruders. Identification with one's social group is clearly one purpose of fashion. And one way we signal our affiliation with a social group is through clothing: this is true whether your group is a Mayan tribe, or mums at the school gate. 
He's got a point. 
It's quite likely that those other women are far more likely to notice what you're wearing than any passing male.

How to dress for success

Watch a video here about first impressions and how to dress for success.....



it's great to see our University of Hertfordshire research featured in this video, which reinforces the message conveyed in an earlier post that dress disasters can ruin your job prospects ... without you even knowing it.

Baboons in stilettos

A friend recently confessed that she wears high heels all the time because her husband ‘prefers them’. (So if you thought he looked sexier in a horse-hair cod piece, he’d wear one for you would he?) ….

Her hubbie obviously hasn't descended down the same line as Matt Rudd who, in today’s Sunday Times, is bewildered that women wear things that cripple them with blisters and prevent them from running. When it comes to heels there are clearly two types of males, those affected by lordosis and those who aren’t.

Lordosis, I hear you cry, what the Jimmy Choo is that?

It’s an abnormal forward curvature of the spine. The position that a high heel forces the female form into, with the back arched and the buttocks invitingly tipped up. According to the American Physical Therapy Association, “Walking in high heels forces the back to arch and the chest to thrust forward. Basically, high heels cause the neck and back to hyperextend.”

If you’re thinking this is a load of babboon’s buttocks you’re right, it’s the courting pose of mammals. 

Helen, Fisher, author of the Biology of Attraction, says:

"Some women also have a characteristic walk when courting; they arch their backs, thrust out their bosoms, sway their hips, and strut. No wonder many women wear high-heeled shoes. This bizarre Western custom, invented by Catherine de Medici in the 1500s, unnaturally arches the back, tilts the buttocks, and thrusts the chest out into a female come-hither pose. The clomping noise of their spiky heels draws attention too."

Despite a recent finding that high heels denote emotional instability during cognitive appraisal, it seems that evolutionary psychology is alive and well and tripping down the catwalk. Or the high street.

Disastrous dress undoes job prospects

I was chatting about fashion psychology yesterday with a friend who works at a very prestigious university, when suddenly her face lit up.

“We’ve just made an appointment,” she said  “and now it’s struck me that we appointed the best dressed candidate.”

Each applicant had to give a presentation to a panel and an audience of peers. 

The first candidate, she said, had obviously borrowed his suit. It was at least three sizes too big, the sleeves hung down over his hands and the jacket almost reached his knees. 

“It swamped him,” my friend told me, “and now I realise he seemed diminished by it in so many ways, he came across as completely powerless.”

The next candidate, a woman, was smartly dressed except her blouse didn’t quite meet the top of her trousers. 

“We were seated right at mid-rift level, the woman was standing up and her bare belly was in our eye-line. I’m afraid it detracted from what she was saying…could we really work with someone who had exposed so much flesh at our first encounter?”

Apparently the third candidate matched the first two on experience and credentials, plus he was also dressed appropriately; good fitting suit, clean shoes, open-necked shirt. 

He got the job.

I've come for the job

It’s so easy to overlook sartorial turn-offs like these. No one ever mentions them in the rejection letter ("We're very sorry but.... that suit... what were you thinking???")

Anyway the impression is mostly subliminal, exerting its effect unconsciously. 

Yet recent research I’ve been involved in is showing just how much these things matter in the job market. 

Shabby suits on men spell failure, not success (see earlier blog)

Exposing too much flesh marks a woman out for a low status job and scuppers her chances of reaching the top, as we've reported here previously.

In 2009 Wookey et al found that a provocatively dressed female Chief Executive Officer was rated as less competent than a professionally dressed CEO, a professionally dressed office assistant and a provocatively dressed office assistant.

They conclude that: “…sexiness is associated with social ability in low-status jobs, but when a woman is in a position of power, sexiness may be viewed as dysfunctional and inappropriate."

Wookey, M. L., Graves, N. A., & Butler, J. C. (2009). Effects of a sexy appearance on perceived competence of women. The Journal of Social Psychology, 149, 116-118.

  

What ‘price’ do you put on being fashionable?

Fashion theorists often debate whether fashion liberates or enslaves women. Arguably, all fashions are enslaving. 

But some are more enslaving than others. 

Tight skirts restrict free movement.

Heels are one of the weird ways in which women
 are trapped by fashion,
according to Professor Mary Beard.

High heels make walking difficult and running nigh impossible.

And then there are nail extensions.

Nail extensions strike me as the most enslaving of all current fashions. Just when we’ve become liberated to the point where we can do virtually anything men can do, we go and turn ourselves into Edwina Scissorhands.

Modern handicapping?

In fact, the practice of affixing acrylic appendages to the ends of women’s fingers strikes me as the modern equivalent of foot-binding.

It undermine’s women autonomy. It stops them from performing a whole host of quotidien acts fundamental to life.I have normal, unextended nails. That means I am free to:

• Knead dough
• Tickle a baby
• Throw a pot on a wheel
• Sow seeds
• Caress my husband

without causing anybody grievous bodily harm.
I defy anyone to do any of those things in one-and-a-half-inch rock-hard chiselled and lacquered nail extensions (OK I just defy anyone to do the last one).
As Thoreau said, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it”
At the risk of getting my eyes scratched out, I would say any fashion that involves physical bonds is over-priced. Not just monetarily but in the treasured moments of life sacrificed for it.

I'm all for adornment, just not into self-crippling or self-handicapping adornment.  

Check this out:

The Body Adorned exhibition at the Horniman Museum explores how people clothe and adorn their bodies, with a special focus on London. Over time, saris, tattoo parlours, nail bars, distended ears and scarification have become a visible, everyday part of the London cityscape. But how did cultural adornments become integrated into urban London life? This exhibition invites you to look at how you dress your body and why. It’s well worth a visit.

The Body Adorned runs until

 6^th January 2013. 

www.horniman.ac.uk