Clothing and Personal Identity

For eight years, I had to wear a uniform to school. While doing so, I never felt quite myself. The colors were boring, and the style expressed severity and conformity. Only when I made the uniform my own by adapting it to my tastes as much as I could did I begin to feel comfortable with it.

Almost everyone has felt something similar; wearing clothes you don’t like, that don’t suit your tastes, elicits a general feeling of unease and discontent.

This attests to the fact that clothes have more than a merely utilitarian role in life. If they needed to be only functional objects, providing protection, warmth, and modesty, then, as long as they did the job, it would make no difference to us how our clothes looked. But, obviously, it does.

Clothes communicate something about the wearer. As commentator and former fashion editor Caryn Franklin writes, “Fashion offers a dialogue rich with social and political meaning for those who want to unlock the language of clothes. . . . Way beyond functions of protection or warmth, we recognize the power of clothes to proclaim or augment individual and collective identity.”¹ Throughout history, thanks to laws, social conventions, and cost, people’s clothes typically expressed their status and/or the values of the group they identified with (such as their religion or profession). But with the growth of industry and the withering of sartorial laws and customs, people increasingly turned to their wardrobes as a means of expressing their values.

How do clothes convey what’s important to us? Many people have trouble articulating why they’re attracted to certain styles, and they may even think their tastes are causeless. The effect of different styles is, in the words of Virginia Postrel, so “immediate, perceptual, and emotional” that often there seems to be no cause for why we like certain aesthetics but not others.² But, as Postrel argues in The Substance of Style, “Aesthetics conjures meaning in a subliminal, associational way, as our direct sensory experience reminds us of something that is absent, a memory or an idea.”³ The associations we develop throughout our lives imbue certain clothes or styles with meaning, and that meaning causes us to like or dislike those looks.

Take colors, for instance. We like or dislike certain colors because of the attributes or moods we associate with them. Those associations might be cultural, such as how, in the West, most people associate white with purity and innocence, whereas in China, people associate it with death and mourning. Or we can form associations based on our personal experience and values. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book The Little Prince offers a fictional example of the latter: After meeting the blond little prince, the fox says that from now on, the sight of wheat, which had been meaningless to him, will bring him pleasure because it will remind him of the color of the boy’s hair.

Because of the meaning that aesthetic associations convey, clothes can indicate what is important to us and thus express aspects of our identity. As Postrel puts it, “I like this becomes I’m like this.”⁴ According to Postrel, this can extend to everything from home decor to toilet brushes and cellphones. But of all the things we buy, clothes perhaps most easily and deeply express our identity. Unlike other objects we own, clothes are an integral part of our personal appearance, which Postrel calls “the most inescapable signal of identity.”⁵ The wide variety of affordable clothing gives us a great deal of control over our appearance, enabling us to express ourselves in ways that fit the occasion.

Certain clothes often evoke particular ideas about the types of people who wear them. Someone who likes to wear sweatpants all the time, for instance, will have different values and personality traits than someone who wears elegant clothes. Many of the latter consider sweatpants, as late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld put it, “a sign of defeat.”⁶ But, some might regularly wear sweats because they are comfortable, relaxed, and integrate with their focus on getting things done.

Further, certain elements of clothing can add layers of meaning and expression. Clothing patterns might contain lines and shapes with which we associate meaning. For instance, we generally associate straight lines with purpose, intellect, and order; and curved lines with passivity, softness, nature, and pliability.⁷ As for shapes, we might associate squares with stability, and triangles with dynamism.⁸ Patterns can also represent symbolic objects—for instance, butterflies, which we often associate with beauty, peace, or metamorphosis. We might also associate certain fabrics with different qualities of character; the down-to-earth sobriety of tweed conveys something different than the cold elegance of satin. Particular cuts, colors, ornaments, and accessories can add layers of meaning to our clothing, too.

For the most part, only fashion designers regularly identify these meanings conceptually, but most people sense what different outfits can say: I’m serious or carefree, dramatic or shy; I value masculinity or femininity, comfort or elegance—or, perhaps, a combination of traits and values. Because associations can differ widely from person to person and culture to culture, others might read into our outfits something different than we intend and, thus, misunderstand our values and identity. But as long as we are not wearing our clothes specifically to communicate certain traits to others in a specific context (such as professionalism at a job interview), what others think of our clothes should be less important than what we think of them and why we choose to wear them. We ought to dress to benefit ourselves, not others.

As Franklin writes, “clothes have the psychological power to elevate our sense of self.”⁹ But they also have the power to weaken it. This happens because our clothes can either express our identity or contradict it. If they express it, they make us feel good. If they contradict it, then they make us feel uncomfortable. Each of us has an image of our true self, as Postrel explains,

not as a disembodied set of thoughts but as a visual, tactile creature, whose authentic identity is reflected in the sensory aspects of . . . person, places, and things. People can look at me and see something true about who I really am. I can see myself reflected in my surroundings. Surface and substance will match. This is the aim of aesthetic meaning—to capture and convey identity, to turn our ineffable sense of self into something tangible and authentic.¹⁰

In other words, clothing enables us to integrate mind and body, to express our values at the perceptual level.

Today, it’s easier than ever to find clothes that, in every detail, express our identity. What’s more, so long as we don’t sacrifice more important values in the process, finding just the right clothes is not vain or trivial, but meaningful and life serving. Wearing clothes we like serves an important psychological function: It enables us to experience and express our identity visually and tactilely. We can get that important value even if we don’t know why we like the clothes we choose to wear. But the more we consciously identify why we like certain clothes, the more we can choose those that best express our values—and the more pleasure and confidence we can gain from wearing them.

About Andreea Mincu

Andreea Mincu is a freelance writer with a degree in film production.

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