Dressed for Success: How Your Workplace Clothing Is Affecting You

Dressed for Success: How Your Workplace Clothing Is Affecting You

Stop reading for a second, and take a look at what you’re wearing. Does it represent something about you? Have you noticed if your clothes affect how you feel? Have you thought about how your clothes are perceived by others?

Every organization has a dress code, whether written or unwritten. The way a person dresses for their workplace is more important than they might think because of the different ways it affects them. Whether official or unofficial, departments in an organization should discuss their dress code and choose one that finds a balance between work and personal identities and that helps them feel productive and appears professional to outsiders.

The first noteworthy dilemma when it comes to workplace attire is a person’s identity. Many workers struggle to find an appropriate balance between their professional and personal identities. There is plenty of research about organizational identity but recent studies have found that expression of personal identity impacts how people think and act at work. It even affects turnover rates. Different jobs have different requirements when it comes to this. For example, most accountants dress business formal, while editors dress more casually. This allowins them to express more of their personal identities. With a person’s work and environment in mind, they should find ways (even small ways) to express themselves, while remaining professional.

Clothing also has an effect on people’s perceptions of themselves. Have you ever heard of the term enclothed cognition? According to an article in the Journal of Social Psychology, it is “the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological process” through the symbolic meaning of clothing and the physical experience of the wearer. Basically, it’s when a person adopts traits they associate with the clothing they wear. Applying this idea to the workplace, researchers found that medical students who wore lab coats had a higher selective attention than those who didn’t.

Most organizational dress codes are aimed at how employees are viewed by others. 

“Lately I have dressed down more at work and have noticed that people tend to give me more detailed instructions and are more worried about me getting something wrong that when I dressed up,” a man interviewed for an article about clothing communication said. In the example of editors and accountants, supervisors wanted the former to come off orderly and rational and the latter to be seen as creative. The most commonly researched clothing-based judgement is competency, which is where gender enters the picture.

Women have countless clothing options in comparison to men. Strikingly, the dress code in order for women to be taken seriously is much narrower in comparison. This is explained best when it comes to dressing business formal. Our culture has come to associate suits (originally male pieces of clothing) with leadership qualities. Women have had to adapt to that. Research shows that no matter what type of suit a woman wore, she was always perceived as less competent than a man in a suit. They also found that women dressing masculine only extends to wearing a suit. Women were rated higher in a skirt suit than in a pantsuit because women are criticized for lack of femininity. 

Even the number of buttons done up on a blouse has a role in competence perception. Miniscule changes making women appear more “provocative” led them to be rated more negatively. This leaves women with the balancing act of looking masculine, but not too masculine; looking young, but not too provocative; and being socialized into roles that are overly preoccupied with how others seen them. All the while men are perceived as the more competent ones.

Knowing the complexities of balancing identities, self-perception, outward impressions and gender inequalities in clothing we see how important clothing is in the workplace and we should discuss it in our different contexts. The next time you’re picking out an outfit for work think about these things and how they apply to your organization. Are there norms that need to change? Gender inequalities? Find or make a place to talk about them.