One evening I was invited to a farewell party for a friend at a club in downtown DC. I stepped in the establishment wearing a curve-hugging black dress with my strapped ankle, black stilettos. My waist-length boxbraids were framing my minimally made-up face and I sealed my wardrobe with a burgundy lip. You couldn’t tell me I wasn’t looking red-hot that evening. Since my sexy vibe was illuminating throughout the evening, a higher than usual amount of guys try to spit their game to me. Even one of them was willing to be my photographer for the first half evening. In the words of Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but think, was I feeling really sexy because of the way I was dressed?
At the Club
According to Adam Hajo and Adam D. Galinsky, professors at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, they would say maybe yes.
In a 2012 experiment, They had subjects perform a logical test while wearing a white lab coat-like a doctor would wear (group one), painter’s coat (group two) and not wearing one, but looking at the coat (group three). Those who wore the “lab coat” scored higher than the other two groups.¹
From there, they coined the term enclothed cognition in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology meaning that it’s the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearers psychological process. They also wrote in that it involves co-occurrence of two indicating factors – “symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them.”
Meaning clothes may have the power to physically change your mood, feelings and attitude.
They believed the subjects who wore the lab coat may have adapted the characteristics that a doctor stereotypically possess – example: smart, cautious, confident.
A few other sources, echos the idea that clothes can influence the way we think. It’s possible it’s less about the actual garments and more about the associations tied to them.
So, if you want to feel sexy, smart, powerful, feminine or whatever, make sure you wear an outfit that you feel it associates with your desired adjective. When clothing has a symbolic meaning for the wearer, it also affects the wearer’s behavior.
How to wear what you want to feel
1. How do you want to feel today?
2. What clothes and/or accessories do you feel associate that with that word?
Once you have your answer, run to the nearest closet.
¹Adam H, Galinsky AD: Enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2012, 48 (4): 918-925.
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