I would imagine these are pretty easy to find, and with a little tailoring would be a great, masculine casual jacket. The hip holster helps too.
Dress Better. It’s Science
Just finished reading a report over at the New York (Beta) Times about the psychological effect our clothing can have on us.
If you wear a white coat that you believe belongs to a doctor, your ability to pay attention increases sharply. But if you wear the same white coat believing it belongs to a painter, you will show no such improvement.
So scientists report after studying a phenomenon they call enclothed cognition: the effects of clothing on cognitive processes.
It is not enough to see a doctor’s coat hanging in your doorway, said Adam D. Galinsky, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who led the study. The effect occurs only if you actually wear the coat and know its symbolic meaning — that physicians tend to be careful, rigorous and good at paying attention.
The findings, on the Web site of The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, are a twist on a growing scientific field called embodied cognition. We think not just with our brains but with our bodies, Dr. Galinsky said, and our thought processes are based on physical experiences that set off associated abstract concepts. Now it appears that those experiences include the clothes we wear.
This study points out two major things to me.
First is that, whether we like it or not, the clothes we wear carry as much meaning as the words we say or the actions we perform. It’s another knife in the chest of the slobs who say it doesn’t matter how they dress. Sorry guys, it actually and measurably does.
In the first[experiment] 58 undergraduates were randomly assigned to wear a white lab coat or street clothes. Then they were given a test for selective attention based on their ability to notice incongruities, as when the word “red” appears in the color green. Those who wore the white lab coats made about half as many errors on incongruent trials as those who wore regular clothes.
In the second experiment, 74 students were randomly assigned to one of three options: wearing a doctor’s coat, wearing a painter’s coat or seeing a doctor’s coat. Then they were given a test for sustained attention. They had to look at two very similar pictures side by side on a screen and spot four minor differences, writing them down as quickly as possible.
Those who wore the doctor’s coat, which was identical to the painter’s coat, found more differences. They had acquired heightened attention. Those who wore the painter’s coat or were primed with merely seeing the doctor’s coat found fewer differences between the images.
Second is that our own latent abilities can be drawn out depending on how we dress. This is a key aspect in developing the confidence to accomplish whatever task you have your mind on.
Are you nervous about approaching a girl because you feel like your life isn’t together enough to merit any attraction. Throw on a suit, it will have an actual change on the confidence you feel and therefore, the confidence you project.
I went rock climbing last night for my first time. I can’t imagine how it would have felt if I were wearing jeans, a polo, and a jacket instead of gym shorts, climbing shoes and a T-shirt. Knowing that I was dressed appropriately gave me a bit more of an edge and made me more comfortable on the wall.
I bet you play golf a bit better if you dress like a golfer.
The possibilities of this could be very interesting and I’m curious to see if they go beyond this initial study.
It would also be great Contrast Game for those who already have a gold-plated inner sense of themselves. If you can command a room of bankers wearing jeans and a T, the contrast will just make them and everyone else in there look up to you even more.
Have any of you ever noticed an increase in your performance when you wore something more appropriate?
If your loafers…
Taking Your Style to the Next Level
It’s all about attitude… and weight, and skin tone, and hair and everything else you could possibly think of. But mostly it’s about attitude.
We’ve talked before about the difference between an outfit looking natural and looking like a costume. I want you to look at the two pictures below.
Notice how goofy this guy looks. Now it may just be that he’s not very photogenic, but I doubt it. He’s wearing a submissive smile, his haircut makes it look like he’s trying to hide the fact that he’s balding instead of embracing it. It also looks boyish instead of more adult. His stance is awkward and the colors are all wrong for his skin tone. The light tones make his freshly-resurrected-from-winter pasty skin look even more pale.
Contrast that with this guy. Yes it absolutely helps that he’s a lantern-jawed male model. But notice the other thing that are hard to quantify. His hair is cut like a man instead of a hipster. His posture is very commanding and he’s obviously very comfortable with the woman in the picture (these two models may have just met two minutes before this shoot but he sure doesn’t seem intimidated by her, does he?). His smile is knowing instead of supplicating. His clothes are honestly just as goofy as our first gentleman, but he pulls it off so much better.
Dressing better is one of the easiest things a man can do to improve himself. It just takes a little bit of instruction, some funds, and some creativity. But in order to really step up your style game, you have to improve yourself. You need to get into shape, develop social confidence, groom yourself properly, be comfortable in your own skin and not look like you’re constantly seeking validation.
I’ll admit that developing all those takes a lot more time and effort. As a man, you shouldn’t let either one intimidate you. And while you’re developing them, you should act like you have them. Developing an attitude can often preclude getting where you want to be. Having that attitude can make even a T-shirt and jeans look good and will make your improved style look even better.
Why Should I Care?
This is a post for those who are new to the blog. You can take it as an introduction of sorts. In my real-life interactions with people I have a lot of men who ask me why I dress the way I do. For some it’s genuine curiosity, others do it out of a sense of discomfort, and some do it because they want to be able to do so themselves.
It’s a tough question to answer. A woman dresses the way she does as a way to attract men and as a way to fit comfortably in with the women in her in group and distinguish herself from those of her out group. For a man, it’s not this cut and dry. Yes women are attracted to how a man looks but a man’s appearance doesn’t carry the same weight in the sexual and dating/marriage marketplace as a woman’s does. And most men don’t want to fit in the same way a woman does.
We’ll come back to fitting in in a minute. I bet a lot of you men like to consider yourselves lone wolves. In fact, the most common excuse I hear from men who feign aesthetic apathy is that they don’t care what anyone else thinks of them. If you’ve said that to yourself, I’m calling your bluff right now. If you didn’t care, you’d be wearing a Forever Lazy or some similar robe-style getup day in and day out.
“But my boss makes me dress a certain way to work”
That may be true, but you comply because you care what your boss thinks. You care what your boss thinks because he’s the one who pays you so you can have a roof over your head and sleep at night.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why the way you dress is important? If you think about it, the clothing we wear is extremely arbitrary. Most of it is equal in accomplishing the dual function of privacy and protection. There’s little functional benefit between wearing pair of relaxed jeans instead of a pair of slim ones.
But clothing is like speaking. Making different noises with our mouths would seem fairly arbitrary to a species that did not use spoken language. But since Man has attached meaning to those sounds they have become extremely important. Whether you like it or not, Man has attached meaning to the different clothing that we wear.
So getting back to fitting in, men don’t want to fit in like women do. When a woman finds herself as part of a group, she wants to fit in with that group as much as possible. She sees value in the women around her and wants to copy and replicate that same value.
As men we’re a bit different. Yes we’re still human and yes we have the same tendencies to be in and form packs. But a man wants to fit into a group the same way a particular part functions within a car. It doesn’t matter how many V12 engines you have, if you don’t have the rest of the materials you need, that group of engines will never become a functioning vehicle. You need a frame, the axles, the wheels, the doors, windows, interior, carbs, brakes, etc. Men want to fit into a group as a unique piece that contributes to the greater whole. And as much as you like to think you’re a lone wolf, a single engine is no better than a room full of engines. Men need other men to survive and then to thrive.
So what does this have to do with clothing? Well, the clothes we wear, those arbitrary pieces of cloth that now have attached meaning, communicate what part of the whole we want to be. A business man wears a suit to communicate to other men what function he can serve. A policeman wears a uniform to do the same. Even the neon vests on construction crews communicate things to the world around them.
But it’s more than just communicating how we fit in within the rest of society. What a man wears communicates his opinion of what happens within that society. He may wish to show reverence to the deceased by wearing all black to a funeral, he may wish to stand out from other men by wearing a different bathing suit at the beach and thereby communicating a willingness to be different, he may even subconsciously wish to convey that his own comfort is more important than anything else around him by wearing sweats when he goes to the grocery store.
Regardless of what we wear, we communicate our opinion of the people we associate with or the situations we find ourselves in.
That means it’s just as inappropriate to wear a suit all the time as it is to never wear one at all. It means it’s just as crucial to know what your outfit means to those around you as it is to know what your words say. It means that wishing it didn’t matter isn’t going to make it so.
If a man doesn’t learn how to dress well, he cripples himself almost as much as if he didn’t learn how to read. He hurts his interactions with women, he hurts his interactions with his employers, he hurts his interactions with his customers, and he even hurts his interactions with his family.
So stop trying to come up with excuses for not dressing better. You’ll never come up with a valid one, just like you’ll never come up with a valid reason not to learn how to do any other number of things that can get you ahead in life. Learn to dress well to respect those who matter to you more. Learn to dress well to get a better job. Learn to dress well to be able to relax when you go on vacation. Learn to dress well to be able to show that you’re a fuel rod instead of a CV joint.
Whatever reason you need to focus on, just learn to dress well. No you’re not your khakis, but your khakis can help others see who you really are.