Dressing for success?

What we wear is a triggering issue for many people, some love fashion, others think it is a form of oppression, some delight in their freedom, others feel lost, confused and do not know what the fuss is about whilst being sure they are getting it wrong! What are you dressing for? We have the habits of clothing that we were given, inherited as social norms and literally from older siblings, we have expectations of what is normal and strange. However few of us really consider what we are dressing for, is it just to fit in or rebel, to tell people what we are or is it an expression of what we want to be, by wearing the clothes of the person we want to be in ten years time. There is no denying that what we wear is an expression of our social intelligence, we are visual creatures, the importance of body language is well known and louder than the words we use or how we say them, so what we choose to wear speaks just as much as any other visual clue as to who we are.

We can not help our first impression (but you can have an open mind that you might be wrong), and despite denials we know this to be true or we would not have the fear of judgement that drives so many of our choices in what we wear, and if you disagree with this, try going out in public in just a nappy and see how much you do not care about the judgement of others then (but so not stand anywhere near me, thank you!). There is no getting away from the fact that people do judge you, and that it is wise to use judgement, if you see a tiger, Run, it is better to feel foolish that it was a fake shadow of a tiger later than be non-judgemental and be a tiger's lunch. We particularly fear the judgement of our social intelligence because we are tribal creatures, we needed each other to survive and we rely on the judgement to modify our behaviour and thoughts, we outsource our sense of what is normal and socially acceptable to groupthink because evolutionarily it was cost effective and simplest way to create social cohesion. We can tell how close we are to others by how honest we are with our first thoughts, those that we share with our closest friends, whereas if you do not know someone, you are much more likely to think about what you are just about to say.

Given that you want to demonstrate your social intelligence in how you dress, the next question is what do you want? What does success look like to you? If you want to be a banker, you best dress like a banker especially at work, turning up in sandals is probably not going to get you promoted. If you want to attract a particular partner dress like the type of person they would want. Though when you have more freedom in the range of what you can wear, strangely it can make the choices more stressful, an uniform is simple you do not have to think about it, whereas when you have freedom it can say more about you, it has more implications for the expression of your social intelligence, it makes it a more complex language.

However it is important to realise that the time that this clue to our social intelligence is most valuable is in the absence of other information, hence it is most important as a first impression when we have not interacted with someone. When we know someone what they wear become a lot less important, especially when we have friends who share a view that what you wear is not a defining quality of who you are. Which is why the uniform approach can be very useful, once you have decided what you want to say to people that you are meeting for the first time, you can decide on a style that says that in an elegant way. If you do not care about fashion, there are the timeless classics that work because they are tried, tested, simple and fitted.

There are only three important things about clothes, fit, quality of material and colour, there are people in YouTube land who care about these things and can tell you a lot more about them, but in simple terms that even I can understand, fit means it fits the body that you have (not the one you want!), quality is a matter of how it feels next to your skin (linen good, polyester bad) and colour, which are the tones that suit your hair and skin colour, I am olive skinned therefore natural tones such as green, brown, blue suits me, and you only have to know what suits you as you only have to dress yourself, as I will now demonstrate by knowing nothing about any other tones! The great thing about buying the right clothing for you is that all the clothes you buy will match each other, mostly because all the colours work together, and you will have the beginning of a capsule wardrobe, which is like a normal one except with less clothes and importantly less choice, if you have seven tops, seven bottoms and seven pairs of shoes, you have 343 outfits and all the combinations work together, if you have seventy of each but with random colours you have 343,000 combinations but only 50,000 that work together and for you. Which shows why it takes longer to get ready in proportion with a greater amount of clothes and options you have.

Which if you have a goal outside of just looking good, there is the opportunity to deal with the clothing issue and move on to focus your time on what you want to achieve whilst still demonstrating social intelligence and not having to worry about how you look to people you want to have a good first impression on. However it does require some upfront thought about how you look, you have to make the effort to understand how clothing works, why things work together and then buy the right things to save you hassle later, this requires effort and sadly most people are just not prepared to put that work into something they think is a waste of time.

Though it also means that it only need a small amount of work to put you ahead of the pack, as you know if you are running away from a tiger, you do not need to out run the tiger just the slowest of your friends! It only takes a matter of hours to watch videos on capsule wardrobe, what colours works for you, how clothes fit and the experience of what is good quality, and it puts you ahead of eighty percent of people out there, that is how easy it is to turn a weakness into a strength when you try to understand and deliberately set out to learn a new skill.

Once you figure out your fashion, do not stop there, you will have more weaknesses not all of them solved so quickly but you have the confidence that you have tackled one problem so why not the next? Dressing for success is a small win but an impactful one, it does change other people's impression of you and your own perception, it can even bring you joy that you are a more mature version of yourself, you have grown, you are a little better and you can now talk a different language, that unspoken shared bond of people who get the manners of dressing, the please and thank you of good manners, that you are a physical presence that has grace and speaks with simple elegance, whatever that might mean to you, because that is what we all desire, good communication that reaches out to others, rather than putting barriers up between us. That is the success that I want to be open, approachable and thoughtful, to care about the silly things that others care about and to know why they matter to them, then other people might be interested in the silly things that I care about, which sound a good world to me.