Fashion Signaling

If the old axiom, “You are what you eat” is true when it comes to food, can we say the same about the clothes we wear?

Clinical psychologist Dr. Jennifer Baumgartner, author of You Are What You Wear: What Your Clothes Reveal About You, shared her insights about the psychology of fashion in the Forbes article, What Your Clothes Say About You.

“Shopping and spending behaviors often come from internal motivations such as emotions, experiences and culture,” says Dr. Baumgartner. “You look at shopping or storing behaviors, even putting together outfits, and people think of it as fluff. But any behavior is rooted in something deeper. I look at the deeper meaning of choices, just like I would in therapy.”

To put it simply, a shirt is not just a shirt. What we wear becomes sartorial shorthand for age, race, ethnicity, gender, income, upbringing, education, and interests, to name a few.

Fashion choices can also signal geographical origin, as I discovered on an outing with my wife to Lowe's a few weeks ago to pick up some wood stain for a house project. The young, black male cashier greeted us with a quizzical expression as we walked up to the check out counter with our purchase.

“Y’all ain’t from around here, are ya,” he proclaimed.  

 “What was that?” my wife asked the cashier, not understanding what he said.

“He said we’re not from around here,” I answered my wife.

“Oh, I was born here,” my wife said to the cashier. “What made you think that we’re not from here?”

“Your Patagonia,” replied the cashier.

My wife was wearing a Patagonia backpack along with a t-shirt of a local coffee place we frequent quite often, and I was wearing a screen printed t-shirt of the album cover for The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack. Both of us were wearing shorts and flip flops, too. Admittedly, this is not standard Wichita fashion, but I didn’t think it read that we were from out of town.

In spite of the initial awkwardness of the conversation, we eventually learned that this young man – who was originally from Chicago – moved to Wichita because of a woman. Can’t say I blame him for doing so; I did the same for my wife.

After we completed our purchase and walked to our vehicle, my wife and I talked about how we were both a little taken aback by the cashier’s initial presumption. Nevertheless, he was correct; neither my wife nor I are exactly born and bred Wichitans. I spent the first eighteen years of life in Osage City, Kansas, a town of just under 3,000 people that’s a half hour drive south of Topeka. In between that time and last year when I moved to Wichita, I had lived in Lawrence, Kansas, Seoul, and Kansas City. My wife, on the other hand, was born and raised in Wichita for the first fourteen years of her life, but had lived a decade outside of the Midwest in California, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut before returning to Wichita in 2012.

As with the places we’ve lived, what we wear imparts a certain quality to the people we meet. Like it or not, our clothes tell our stories; who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. People judge us by what we wear even before we speak. If you live like I do in a postindustrial society such as the United States, personal branding is becoming more important than ever, and what you wear is an integral part of your personal brand.

Or, as Mark Twain eloquently put it more than a century ago, “Clothes make the man.”