Menswear Is Framing For Your Personality, Not Your Personality

It seemed worth pointing out

I got a couple comments in my last post to the effect of:

Similarly:

I think these are reasonable points and I spent a little while thinking about them, and this is what I came up with.

Clothes Are The Canvas On Which Self-Presentation Is Painted

When you decide to paint a thing as an artist, you need to select a canvas. This is not an optional part of the procedure; the paint has to go on something and the thing you choose for the paint to go on will determine how your audience interprets the painted elements. The same paint will appear quite different on a black or a white canvas. This doesn’t mean your painting needs to be black or white; really it doesn’t shoehorn you into any specific painting at all.

So it is with clothing.

When I’m dressing in heritage workwear… look, I’m a weirdo. It is profoundly strange in our culture to write 8000 words of review for a dating coach or to quit your job to take up dance or to make salsa tracks out of your dance partner’s complaints about kohlrabi. On first glance, the reality of my innermost self clashes dramatically with the vibe I am presenting via wardrobe.

However, my Heritage/Americana wardrobe does imply some true facts about me: “I am a very practical person who is a little bit impatient with airy abstractions that never ground themselves in concrete reality.” In rationalist events, I am frequently one of the people who are less-tolerant of abstraction chains that don’t clearly cash themselves out in either specific predictions or concrete capabilities.

Additionally, the more unhinged elements of my personality will get interpreted in light of the very grounded image that my wardrobe projects. The first impressions someone has of you will be anchored by the clothes you put yourself in, and people will gradually update to different perceptions based on what they actually see you do and say. Here’s a diagram

That means if you have lots of zany ideas then dressing as a “respectable” Type of Guy (whatever that means in your circles) can buy you subconscious Weirdness Points which you can then spend on those ideas. There’s a LessWrong post describing this phenomenon but I would argue it’s way more general than that— like, the same wardrobe that gets you taken more seriously in high-powered meetings will make you get flagged as “probably not someone to offer unsolicited drugs to” at a party, at least until someone gets to know you better, and if this is something you’re into (hey, I’m not judging) this can be limiting. A guy I met at LessOnline does a similar workwear thing as I do, but because he’s muscular and has a moustache he says this continually gets interpreted by onlookers as “cop.” (Why would this signal “cop”? Because beards are forbidden, because they prevent gas masks from achieving a tight seal, which means the only people who have moustaches are cops and firefighters!)

There’s a different guy who attends LessOnline who also wears a moustache, but because he dresses as more like an early-1900s industrialist this reads as “artsy bohemian type with a thing for old-timey fashion.”

Or take Mark Zuckerberg post-visual-rework:

He probably conducted this wardrobe change because he got tired of people making jokes about him being some kind of joyless robotic lizard-man, which he got a lot of back when he mostly dressed in suits. We are visual creatures, and I would argue this actually updated people toward perceiving him as “relatable nerd with weird hobby horse about ancient Rome” even though the core of who he is and what he does was totally unchanged.

That means when you’re selecting a Type Of Guy to dress as, if you’re stuck then it might be useful to think in terms of “what perceptual problem am I trying to solve?” instead of “what speaks to my truest self?”

Mull it over.