What Your Clothes Say About You

Experts Say Our Fashion Choices Can Strongly Influence Our Mood, So Here’S How To Create A Wellbeing Wardrobe

- Claire Jensen

If you think fashion is frivolous, think again. One of the simplest ways we can transform our emotions, improve our confidence and affect our personal experiences is through the clothes we choose to wear.

Clothes have a multi-faceted impact on our lives based on a phenomenon scientists call ‘enclothed cognition’, which is the systematic influence clothing has on a wearer’s mental and psychological processes. According to the authors of a 2012 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, this influence is firstly a result of the symbolic meaning that we as a society ascribe to different types of clothing; we consider a suit to be powerful, a uniform to be strict and casual clothes to be more fun and comfortable. Secondly, because first impressions do count, we also tend to evaluate others based on their clothing, and occasions in terms of the physical experience of what we’re wearing at the time and how our clothes make us feel.

“I believe most of the time we’re on autopilot and allow fashion trends to dictate what we’re supposed to wear, which essentially means we’re not in tune with how what we’re wearing impacts us,” says US-based fashion psychologist Dawnn Karen. “But when we take note of the influence clothes have on us, it puts us in the driver’s seat so we can consciously choose our outfits through developing our own unique style based on our personality – irrespective of trends or labels.”

In other words, by becoming aware of the power of clothes, we can develop a wardrobe that suits our values and encourages positive mental processes and perceptions.

It’s emotional