The way you dress does affect your life
Fashion can be a complicated topic and probably is an art that requires lifelong learning. I might not be a fashion expert like Karl Lagerfeld, but I love to share my opinion on how we dress and its impact on our life.
What we wear at home in our own privacy is our own business. We can wear spandex cat-suit or transparent underwear and walk about at home, no one will care, no one will debate about it. When we dress up and go out to public places, it becomes an issue. Why? That’s because the way we dress affects ourselves and other people. It is basically a matter of self respect and respect for others.
Respect is an abstract concept that is hard to be defined. At its broadest level, respect means having acknowledgement that someone has value. The significance of this value is that it changes people’s reactions towards you, typically in a positive way. The way we dress affects this value, which affects how people around us perceive us as a person.
According to Dan Ariely, a foremost behaviour economist, humans have a pattern of irrational behaviours. One of them is called the effect of expectation. Ariely says that when a person believe beforehand that something is good, he will perceive it generally as good. One example is the “Pepsi challenge”, where participants get to taste two cups of cola. One is Coke, the other one is Pepsi. It is a blind test since there is no label saying which cup is Coke or Pepsi. Many people picked Pepsi as the better tasting drink. In another experiment (this time by Coke), when both beverages are served in their respective packaging, people picked Coke. This is pretty irrational, but that is how our brain works.
Coke, the stronger brand of the two, has done a lot of marketing campaign to make its drink look great, with a lot of fancy advertisements of course. These flashy marketing stuffs are already ingrained in people’s mind, making people think of Coke as something wonderful. With already an expectation that it is a great stuff, the higher order brain mechanism got triggered to alter our taste perception towards the Coke drink when people see the awesome packaging, giving Coke an advantage over Pepsi, even though in blind experiment, more people choose Pepsi over Coke. (If you want to read more about it, I recommend the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely)
Just like beverage packaging, our “packaging” is the way we dress up for others to see. It does affect how other people perceive us, especially when we are meeting people for the first time, the look is important to give first impression. If I wear a cheap old T-shirt like a beggar, the respect and expectation that I gain from people around me will be poor. Hence, I might get second class treatment. Karl Lagerfeld once said, “If you are cheap, nothing helps”. It is a good idea to gain an upper hand, by dressing well to gain respect and great expectation from others.
Some people might argue that we should have the freedom to dress however we want regardless of what people think. They can also argue that we should not judge or expect people based on how a person dresses. Yeah, that is pretty ideal, but it is not practical in real world. Lookism is very real in life. People judge us based on how we look, that is a fact that we should accept. The reason some people avoid accepting lookism as a part of life is because people tend to adhere to political correctness. Reality is reality, and we cannot hide from it under the name of political correctness.
Imagine you are a Human Resource manager, and in a job interview, an interviewee applying for a position as CFO comes to meet you in a polo T-shirt. How would you react? For me, I might feel offended that he is not respecting himself (by letting others think he is a cheapskate) and this interview session. Dressing so casually for such an important event, who the hell he think he is? It affects my mood, and most likely I will toss his job application into the dustbin. In this situation, an interviewee is expected to dress formally. This is basic courtesy and common sense.
Besides annoying job interviewers, bad dressers can discredit important events. For example, many people (including me) do not respect Grammy awards, mainly for two reasons. The award is not creditable, and the guests of honour dress without self respect, where many of them dress like hookers in their slutty dresses. It is hard for people to take this kind of event seriously. To make major events highly respectful, dress code is introduced, where people are expected to dress elegantly to make the event, for example Oscar awards, respectable and creditable.
Similarly, posh restaurants have their own dress codes. The gentleman, who enters the restaurant without properly dressed, will be loaned a tie and suit. Why the fuss, you might ask. That is because under-dressing spoils the overall ambient of the restaurant. People pay a lot of money at this kind of restaurant not just for food, but also for mood and atmosphere. Imagine seeing a guy in singlet and slippers sitting at the table next to you when you are dining at a high class restaurant. That would be distasteful. I think the examples mentioned above clearly shows that how you dress affects not just you, your career, your creditability, but also other people and events.
We now know that our way of dressing affects our life and people around us, but we don’t have to spend a lot of money to get the nicest clothes and dress nicely all the time. It doesn’t make sense to go to Wal-Mart in a tux. The dress should match the occasion. Experts suggest that we should have various levels of dressing. For example (this is just my rough guideline), level 1: dressing for staying at home, level 2: casual dress for going out with friends, level 3: for work, level 4: formal attire for business functions and so on. We have to decide which level of clothing is appropriate to match the occasion. This sounds like common sense, but many people mismatch it in real life.
It is helpful to have fashion awareness when we dress. When we choose a clothe to wear, we should be aware of how it makes us look like generally, whether the bright orange shirt match well with the black jacket, or whether the tank top stays in harmony with the mini skirt, and so on. At least we should be aware of it, not just wear it and go without giving a second thought. Dressing up is how you “sell” yourself so don’t take it too lightly.
Our dress can be an expression or manifestation of our personality. Sporty, bold, funny, happy, or dead serious, you make the choice. If things turn out nicely, you can animate your looks greatly with your personality. It is really like an art. We should develop our fashion taste and learn to enjoy doing so.
Dress alone is not everything. How the wearer carries the dress is also important. Therefore, it is a good idea to be aware of how we behave in public. Bad act ruins great dress. Just imagine at a film award event, a stunningly dressed actress digs her nose, and proceeds to bite her nose digging finger. Yuck!
Dress can be subjective and ambiguous. A black gothic style corset can be interpreted differently, from classy and elegant to slutty and cheap. How the dress is perceived by others depends very much on how the wearer brings it to live. Next time if you want to get a corset, I wish you good luck with it.
Some of you might be thinking that everything I have written here is plain common sense and I am wasting time typing all the things that you have already known. The problem is that, we have the tendency to assume that everyone around the world thinks the same like us, which is not true. People from different countries have different culture, different lifestyle and different way of doing things. Some people might not perceive fashion like you. That is why I took so much time to write these basic stuffs in great detail to share them with everyone on this planet.
For example, in Malaysia, food is much more important than fashion, unlike in Japan and France, where fashion is a vital part of life. Malaysians typically don’t care much about fashion. They usually wear just tee and shorts. They rather buy food than invest in good looks. I don’t want to condemn the Malaysians because there are many reasons behind such behaviour. People in different countries have different purchasing power, which might affect their spending habit. In Malaysia, the money that can buy a nice dress might buy me 100 meals. Malaysians might choose good food, the stronger priority, over fashion.
What I would like to advice my countrymen, is not to convince you to change your lifestyle and go fashion-mania, but to ask you to consider fashion as a form of long term investment for your own image and self improvement, just don’t over do it, it can hurt your wallet. Maybe with this mind set, you can make better choices regarding your self image.
Malaysia is a tropical country. Unfortunately, people can’t enjoy winter or spring fashion there, but summer fashion is always the in thing. I think it is a cool idea to learn about style and fashion from some fashionable idols. In my opinion, Sheylara has wonderful fashion taste. The way she dress seems so flawless (never slutty, never over-dressed, always stunning), which makes me believe that she is qualified to be the fashion guru to many Malaysians and Singaporeans. Go read her blog and get some cool summer fashion tips.
I ain’t fair to you guys if I don’t introduce male fashion “role models”. If you are into meterosexual or gayish stuffs (definitely not my cup of tea), you can follow SotongZai. If you want to attract hot chicks and live a bling bling quasi celebrity life, you can try to do a Kenny Sia.
I would like to end this post by showing you an interview video clip of a veteran grade-A celebrity, where she talks about looks and personality. I hope you will learn something from her. Adios!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px-K38VXlWo
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Contributor's Note
How to dress wisely
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This intel first appeared on: http://wisecurve.com/the-way-you-dress-does-affect-you-life/
