Clothes Really Do Make the Man. Damn!!

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

At the core of my personality is an indifference to the clothes I wear.  I don’t say that with pride but with acceptance.  As a young boy, my mother took me to the finest men’s store in Syracuse for an annual, fall clothes shopping trip.  Unlike my brother, who always dressed impeccably, I was apathetic.  Now a grown man, any nice clothes I have came from my wife or children as gifts.

In my first years of college, when my days in the chemistry lab left me with hydrochloric acid holes in my shirts, it was my future wife who had to point them out to me.  Thankfully, she found it amusing.  When she noticed polka dots on my tan corduroy suit (yes, I really did buy a tan corduroy suit), also due to a spray of something in chem lab, I argued that it was okay to keep wearing it.  The dots were pretty evenly spaced throughout the suit jacket, I argued.  Well, you get the point. 

Needless to say, I was comforted by the quote from Walden.  Thoreau goes on to clarify what he is talking about:

“If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be … for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil.”

In my self-satisfied, self-affirming way, I have been fond of this passage for years.  Of course, you can have both a solid, moral center and meaningful work and wear nice clothes, but I preferred Thoreau’s dichotomy or at least his order of preference.  Making a virtue out of a personality quirk is something I’m good at, thought it’s a real stretch to call that a virtue.

After all, I’ve always said, who can really prove that clothes matter?  Adam and Eve, we should remember, led a blissful life without wearing anything.  When they ate from the Tree of Knowledge and got banished from the Garden of Eden they had to work and sweat to survive.  So, it’s original sin that made us start needing clothes – hardly a point in their favor.

In the 1997 film Picture Perfect, Jennifer Anniston plays Kate, an aspiring creative advertising designer who becomes infuriated when a colleague gets a big account even though her idea nailed the client.  Her boss, confronting her disappointment, tells her that advancement also depends on her clothes:  “I was always told we dress for the job we want, not the one we have.”  But that’s the movies, so I blew it off. 

Now comes hard evidence I can’t ignore.  In a series of nine studies at Princeton, subjects judged the faces of people wearing “richer” upper body clothes as more competent than those wearing “poorer” clothes.  Since the same faces were clothed as richer or poorer for different subjects, it was the clothes that made the difference.  Even when study subjects saw the faces for as little as one-seventh of a second, the ratings held up.  In one of the studies, when subjects were told that clothing had nothing to do with competence or were told to ignore what the person was wearing, the biased judgments were still made.  This fits with earlier research that showed men dressed poorly (sweatpants and sandals) who participated in mock negotiations earned only a third of the profit of those dressed in suits. 

I now recognize that, at some subconscious level, I always knew this.  Perhaps my indifference to clothes is genetic.  Maybe that’s why I joined the Air Force, where everyone wore exactly the same thing. Then, I worked for domestic agencies in the federal government, where most Americans assumed I was incompetent no matter what clothes I wore. 

Still, there’s a part of me that fights the notion that we should have to dress a certain way to be judged capable, be taken seriously, and be good at what we do.  Einstein was no clothes horse, nor it seems to me were Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. There are many people who cannot afford nice clothes, and this seems so unfair a criterion to apply in judging them.  There are others, like me, who just don’t care or who, try as they might, can’t pick nice clothes anyway. 

Fairness, empathy, and society’s interest in getting the greatest contributions from everyone should not be contingent on how we cover ourselves.  That was, in a way, Thoreau’s point.  But then he could say that because, out there alone in the woods surrounding Walden Pond, who cares what he wore?

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