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Clothing, personality, and impressions Lilian Moreira Jacques I. Introduction Because humans rely strongly on vision to get information about the environment the prominent visual feature of clothes and ornaments offers a vast array of elements for communication purposes. Furthermore aesthetics is a prevalent dimension of the human experience and clothing is an important vehicle to express such dimension. Costume designers in the performing arts, television and film industries manipulate clothing to evoke different historical periods, social contexts and idiosyncrasies. This shows that clothes can serve other purposes than mere practical ones. Clothes have the ability to express something else, something that belongs to the realm of the symbolic. They can be articulated into a system that represents information, a code that is used to create and communicate meaning in social contexts. Clothing cues reveal, and even induce patterns of social interactions among individuals. Social status is a pervasive issue in any social context, and manipulating clothing may be useful to negotiate social status within groups and institutions. In modern societies where status is mainly determined by occupation, projecting an image of social competence can be decisive for an individual’s career. A study on the influence of physical attractiveness and manner of dress in simulated personnel decisions (Bardack & McAndrew, 1985, as cited in Kaiser, 1999) found that by dressing well, both attractive and unattractive applicants increased significantly their chances of being hired for an entry-level management position in a corporation. Clothing cues are not necessarily indicative of the defining traits of an individual’s personality. Nevertheless, people do form impressions of others based on the way they dress. Impressions are weaker than judgments, but impressions provide material for judgments, and judgments are of great consequence for determining the pattern of interaction between individuals.

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II. Comments on the assigned readings, and other readings, on clothing as a nonverbal channel of communication The articles assigned for this paper investigate the relationship between clothing and identity, clothing and satisfaction, and clothing and fashionability. Feinberg, Mataro & Burroughs (1992) used social identity descriptors to examine the issue of clothing and social identity. They observed that the consensus between observers and subjects about the social information encoded in clothes (meaning) was obtained only when subjects selected outfits with the purpose of representing themselves. They concluded that clothing cues do have meaning but the perceived meaning of clothes does not necessarily reflex the personality of the individual who is wearing them. Piacentini & Mailer (2004) used the symbolic consumption paradigm to investigate teenagers’ consumption behavior in regard to clothes and brands. They found that teenagers’ clothes choices are linked to issues of self-concept and identity. These issues become particularly relevant during adolescence, because people are experiencing role fluidity and transition at that stage. The symbolic property of goods empowers adolescents to consolidate new roles. The study showed that teenagers make judgments about others based on clothing cues, and that they use clothing to express individuality and also to conform. In agreement with Bourdieu (1984) the authors contend that teenagers draw on economic, social, and cultural capital to compete for status within their social group. Private school kids who were confident with their socio-economic status, and displayed higher levels of cultural capital, tended to shun brands and symbols of wealth attached to clothes (aesthetic distancing). However, comprehensive school kids from a lower socioeconomic position felt the need to wear branded clothes to indicate that they were not poor. MacGillivray &Wilson (1997) looked into clothing use, satisfaction with clothing, and satisfaction with the body, through three groups, early, middle and late adolescence. Within each group they examined gender and residence. They found that satisfaction with appearance and clothing diminishes from early to late adolescence. They attribute this data to a conflict between an enhanced awareness

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of the cultural norms for beauty and attractiveness by the older adolescents, and the reality of their developing bodies. Males showed a greater need to dress similarly to their peers than females. However all groups and genders claimed that they almost never wore clothes to conform. The middle adolescents reported the least conforming attitude. The authors attribute this contradictory finding about conformity to a form of egocentrism, typical from midadolescence, when kids believe that their experiences are special and unique. Females’ use of clothing was found to fulfill more varied goals than males’ (gain approval, feel good about oneself and feel special). These findings are congruent with our cultural bias that emphasizes female’s appearance and male’s effectiveness. Rural students of both sexes were found to use clothes to conform more often than urban ones. However, rural students used clothes to gain approval less often than the urban ones. Gibbins (1969) used a sample of 15 and 16 year old girls to investigate clothing and fashionability. His results suggested that the major dimension of the meaning of clothes for that group is related to fashionability. Fashion is a term that usually applies to a prevailing mode of expression. It encompasses the idea that the mode will change more quickly than the culture as a whole. In agreement to that definition, Gibbins (1969) argues that fashion is a form of high impact collective behavior. It has the intriguing property of being a continually changing phenomenon, and at the same time inducing extreme conformity. He adds that in the short term, the changes in design of clothes modify only the means of conveying a certain message, rather than modifying the message itself. Trebay in the New York Times Sunday Styles on Sept 2, 2007, inquires why fashion remains the most culturally potent force that everyone loves to deride. Elaine Showalter, a literary critic and academic, says in the same article, that fashion is often viewed as a form of vanity and consumerism that intelligent and serious people are expected to look down on. Such attitude in relation to fashion is likely to stem from people’s school years. Prof. Segrin referred in class to a study by Reed published in 1973 that investigated fashionability and GPA in college students. High fashion (students

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wearing the latest styles) correlated with lowest GPA and non-fashion (students that didn’t seem to care about clothes) correlated with highest GPA. The fact that clothing is a significant nonverbal code is underscored by the fact that it is one of the only two nonverbal behaviors regulated by law (the other one is touch). A federal judge in New Jersey, in the third week of September 2007, ruled in favor of two fifth graders, Johnny and Julie, whose families filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent the school district from suspending the students if they continue to wear buttons displaying the words “No School Uniform” over a photo of boys in Hitler Youth uniforms. The buttons were considered protected speech by the judge, and were deemed harmless for the work and discipline of the school, writes Apllebome in the New York Times on September 23, 2007. III. Analysis of the episode 17 — “Betrayal”, of the TV series “My So Called Life” I will concentrate my analysis on how the director of this TV program used clothing to encode the different “textures” of emotions experienced by Angela Chase and Rayanne Gref as characters of the universal and complex drama of betrayal. I’ll also analyze Rickie Vasquez’s clothing and how it relates to his gender and group affiliation issues. The episode starts at Angela’s bedroom. She awakens in comfortable pajamas that allow her to express (and the spectator to decode), through vigorous dance movements, the buoyancy of her youth, and her desire to be free, including free from her infatuation with Jordan Catalano, she tells us. She chooses an effortlessly elegant, dark green highcollar sweater that matches her fair complexion and the deep red color of her well-cut hair. We can see her parents in the background looking at her with a mist of benevolence and pride, as she eats breakfast and muses about being over Catalano. Angela’s family is not rich but they are seem to be structured and well off, and Angela displays cultural capital in the way she dresses and carries herself (Piacentini & Mailer, 2004). The next scenes take place at the school auditorium where Angela and Rick are encouraging Rayanne to audition for the town play. Rayanne is a petite girl who wears a camouflage patterned short dress over a long sleeved laced blouse, black stockings, and a

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pair of ivory furry boots all the way up to her knees. She carries a large leather bag, with something that looks like a canvas pouch displaying an embroidered or painted badge attached to its strap. She bears lots of ornaments — crystal and plastic beads necklaces, a leather choker with metal pins, bracelets, and dangling earrings that are crosses made of crystal. Her long curly blonde hair is carefully styled to look careless styled. It includes a stripe of bleached hair, a pink plastic barrette, and multicolored bands holding clusters of thin braids up. Rayanne’s outfit is creative, highly ornate, rather baroque. It is meant to express boldness, transgression and independence. However, it gives off insecurity, fear to fail, desire to please and adherence to a spiritual code (the cross). It is construed in contrast to Angela’s cool elegance and self-confidence that Rayanne covets. Thin discreet gold earrings, dark miniskirt, stockings, a burgundy Jansport backpack, light eyes make up and lip gloss complete Angela’s outfit. Her appearance is neat, organized, competent yet very attractive. Angela is a model for Rayanne, who fantasizes her innocence and sweetness (seductiveness) to the point that Rayanne wants to imitate Angela’s gesture — the way she opens her eyes wide, flicks her hair and cries. Rick is overtly gay. He wears a single earring on his left ear to communicate his affiliation to that group. He has a crewcut hairstyle and wears a dark turtleneck shirt topped by a gray vest and adorned with a long silver chain with a cross pendant (also a believer). He also wears a silver band on his left hand pinkie. His outfit is clearly more deliberate than the ones the other young men wear. He hangs out with Angela and Rayanne and he has a crush on Corey Hellfrick, the leather jacketed painter. Angela’s parents Graham and Patty garments match each other. When he’s wearing a burgundy shirt she wears a stripped burgundy vest over an off-white shirt. When she wears green he wears green. Their style is casual, simple but neat. She also wears a small round shaped gold earring like Angela’s, but a little thicker. Her hair is short and well cut. It is clear that she sees a hairdresser. On the evening that Rayanne got drunk and became romantically involved with Catalano, betraying Angela, she was still wearing the same clothes that she wore earlier to school, with the addition of pink lipstick and a checkered jacket.

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On the next day at school the three of them, Angela, Rick and Rayanne wore different clothes but they were consistent with their styles. However, the hat that Rayanne wore that day was so large that she might have chosen it to hide from Angela. Sharon, the girl who is in charge of the yearbook and video, shows an uptight behavior and a professional like (bossy) attitude when talking to Krakow, the video boy. She dresses accordingly, she wears clothes that make her look efficient and has her hair (sort of) up. She hears from Krakow what had happened the night before and she feels compelled to tell Angela about it. She wants to show that she is Angela’s real friend, and that Rayanne who apparently took her place at Angela’s side, has sordidly betrayed her. As it is expected, the universal drama of betrayal entails a deep change in both, the betrayer and the betrayed. In this case because of the explicit Christian symbolism chosen by the director (Rayanne and Rick’s crosses), we will assume that these kids gravitate around that system of belief, and that it influences their feelings, and judgments about themselves and others. In other words they use the Christian moral structure to organize their experiences that tap on the issue of morality. Rayanne’s transformation can be decoded by the way she gradually changes the excesses in her attire without compromising the core of her personal style. When Rayanne confronts Sharon at the bathroom, about her having told Angela what had taken place between Rayanne and Catalano, we see that she is wearing a different cross earring. This one is not a rich crystal cross but a very simple cross, unassuming, almost severe. When she goes to Angela’s house, she wears the simple cross earring and a blue barrette, instead of the pink one that she wore on earlier and happier days, when they were “innocent”. She also wears less ornament than she wore before, less necklaces and hair bands. She is filled with remorse for having hurt Angela. She is suffering because the punishment for her betrayal was to have been cast out of Angela and Rick’s conviviality, a sort of “paradise”. Her wearing a cross is a cue to the spectator about the moral code into which she has been brought up and hints at the kind of inner conflict that she might be experiencing. She confesses the episode to Angela’s mother in order to relieve her guilt and shame. She accepts the hate that she assumes Angela’s mother feels towards her as a sacrifice to expiate her sin. It turns out that Angela’s mother empathize with both girls because she had experienced a similar situation when she was young. She had

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played the role of the betrayer and her best friend Camille, the betrayed, forgave her. Back to school where Rayanne tries to talk to Rick who is avoiding her, we can notice that she has been blowing her hair progressively straighter, and that her attire is becoming more orderly. It is as if the pain of having been rejected is allowing her to tap deeper into herself, and to denude herself of superfluous artifacts, in order to access her core values. We will witness Angela’s transformation through her clothing as well. When Rick tries to retrieve her from the regressive situation that she found herself, crouched in a corner of the ladies room, she wears a checkered shirt, she looks distressed and moderately disheveled (Rick is wearing an unlikely combination of checkers and stripes but he look stylish regardless). However, Angela shocks everybody when she shows up at the painting studio with her hair dyed one tone of red up, with signs of having received some kind of perm treatment, and styled with thin braids like Rayanne’s. She wears heavier make up than she wore before, with a glowing coral lipstick. Her outfit has a lot of red including a crimson scarf around her neck, mimicking Rayanne’s rounds of necklaces. She is on fire! She calls Corey to a corner and tries to kiss him. He withdraws. Angela has an outbreak of intense emotion. She is fed up of being decoded as “innocent”. Rayanne walks in and tells Angela that she had got the part at the town play. She adds that if it weren’t for Angela’s she would have never got it. Angela rebuffs her with sarcasm. Rayanne states that she had been the one who had got really hurt, that she had been the one who lost everything — Angela’s friendship. Angela was still very angry when she went back to Rick’s side. Rick told her that he was happy for Rayanne’s having got the part at the play. Angela reacted asking him on which side he was on . He replied that he was on Angela’s side of course. However, he let her know that he was also being hurt by Angela’s behavior of throwing herself over Corey. Angela realized then that she had been acting irresponsibly in relation to Rick’s feelings. At that moment she starts to change again. She seems to have understood something deeper and more complex than the issue itself — something that might open space for forgiveness and healing in the future, after anger and helplessness have been processed. Episode 17 takes the drama as far as the catharsis stage, when the two girls have the opportunity to communicate through the tragic story of Emily, the heroin of the

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school play, and release their intense emotions by crying. Both girls maintain their original clothing style in the last scene, but very simplified. They are still suffering when they part, but they have attained a deeper understanding of the human condition. IV. Conclusion The choice of episode 17 of My So Called Life to illustrate the relationship between clothing and issues of identity, individuality and group membership in adolescence was instrumental. Feinberg, Mataro & Burroughs (1992) claims that when subjects select clothes with the purpose of representing themselves, there is a consensus between encoders and decoders about the social information encoded in clothes. The director of “Betrayal” used clothing as an important tool to build his characters and to walk them through the story of juvenile betrayal. The consistency of the individual styles that were selected for Angela, Rayanne and Rick, and the way that those styles were manipulated, have provided efficient cues about the nature of the modifications of the inner state of the characters as the drama unfolded, and have represented those modifications effectively. We conclude that clothing is, in fact, a powerful nonverbal code that participates in the dynamic articulation of meaning in social contexts. One last issue worth mentioning is that there may occur a lack of correspondence between the encoded and the decoded meaning of clothes, in spite of the reasonable reliability of the code. When the clothing code fails, communication may be affected in ways that are conducive to misunderstanding and awkwardness. Here is an example: a female friend of mine who has been an activist in the civil rights movements of the late sixties, and who has retained strong political views about the relationship between individuals and institutions, was diagnosed with metastatic disease after having received conventional cancer therapy involving radiotherapy and chemotherapy for many months. My friend grew progressively distrustful of cancer drugs (that caused her so much misery), and of the medical establishment that administered the drugs (who didn’t care). She started to consider abandoning the treatment. However, she was still seeing her oncologist, when in one of the consultations the doctor asked her and her husband if

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someone could sit at the session (probably a psychologist trainee or a medical student). My friend and her husband agreed (because they were too distressed not to agree, they told me latter), and the next thing they saw was a tall, Scandinavian blonde woman, white complexion, very pale, hair impeccably cut, dressed in a fancy well cut black skirted suit, wearing transparent stockings and black high heel shoes, carrying a briefcase. She sat silent and expressionless through the whole appointment. The doctor prescribed a new drug because the one in use was not showing desired results. When the couple left the clinic they had an account of what was going on — the woman in black was a drug representative in cohort with the oncologist. My friend was going to be used as a guinea pig for a new cancer drug that the drug industry was trying to put into the market, the way the woman dressed and looked represented death. Therefore if my friend had any chance of avoiding more misery and uncertainty she should get away from the medical establishment the sooner the better, because she was no more than a guinea pig to them. Sadly that is what she did. Of course this is an extreme case. My friend fell prey to the conspiracy theory. The misinterpretation of the clothing code of the “confederate” was not the only relevant aspect of her communication problem with her doctor. Nevertheless, it has provided elements for impressions that influenced a crucial decision. This case illustrates very well the extent of the consequences that might ensue when codes get messed up, and communication fails.

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References Applebome, P. When School Clothes Make More Than a Fashion Statement. The New York Times: New York, 23 Sept. 2007. 30. Binay, A.,(2001). Symbolic Consumption. Retrieved in Sept 15, 2007. http://www.ciadvertising.org/student_account/fall_01/adv392/abinay/paper1/symbolic_co nsumption.htm Feinberg, R.A., Mataro, L., & Burroughs, W.J. (1992). Clothing and social identity. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 11, 18-23 Gibbins, K. (1969). Communication aspects of women's clothes and their relation to fashionability. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8, 301-312. Kaiser, S.B. (1999). Women’s Appearance and Clothing within Organizations. In Laura K. Guerrero, Joseph A. DeVito, and Michael L. Hecht (Eds.), The Nonverbal Communication Reader: Classic and Contemporary Readings (pp 106113). Long Grove, IL: Waveland. MacGillivray, M.S., Wilson, J.D. (1997). Clothing and appearance among early, middle and late adolescents. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 15, 43-49. Piacentini, M., Mailer, G. (2004). Symbolic consumption in teenagers’ clothing choices. Journal of Consumer Behavior, 3, 251-262. Trebay, G. Admit It. You Love It. It Matters. The New York Times: Sunday Styles, 2 Sept. 2007, 1 +. TV series My So Called Life, episode 17 – Betrayal, 1994/1995. Created by Winnie Holzman

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