Notes on Psychology of Dress

Chapter Six: Appearance Management and Self Presentation

• In everyday life we are caught up in the act of appearing before others.
• We present existing and idealized images of self.
• By managing appearance we can try to shape others’ understandings of our identities.
• Clothes act as props, helping us move form one role to the next (theatre metaphor).
• Appearance management involves experimentation and self-expression.
• Displaying self to others in a social context, i.e. Self presentation.
• Our lives are interwoven with those of others around us.
• Our self-concepts provide some guidelines for dressing (“that’s me” versus “that’s not me”).]
• We are likely to dress differently when we are alone and when we are with others, The private context of self is likely to involve inner dialogue and thought process, experimentation and fantasy.
• Joanne Eicher (1981) uses the term secret self to refer to the self that may not be shared with any other person and notes that the secret self can dress to fulfil fantasies.
• Fantasy clothes may be sexual or bold colours that would not be worn in public. For example conflicts of gender and age may be apparent in the secret appearances of some troubled adolescents as noted by Michelman and Michelman (1986).
• The public context of self is especially likely to include concern about others’ perception of us.
• What motivates us to think about our self presentations? In part, desire to seek and maintain a sense of personal control/power to exert influence over present and future events. May wish to engage in self-presentation for purposes of individually or socially induced concerns.
• Public expression of self becomes an arena for constructing a compromise of actual and ideal self image (Baumeister, 1986).
• Self promotion, appearance display for perusal of others, to further the self in some way- as is common in a job interview or politics.
• A concept that enables us to understand perceptions of self across contexts is identity. An identity is the organised set of characteristics an individual perceives as representing or defining the self in given social situations.
• Although people have on self-concept, they may have contextually relevant identities (Troiden, 1984). For example, a person is likely to dress and behave differently in class than at a party, or when interacting with their mothers than with a date.
• Through the process of self-identification, individuals places (locate or identify) and express their own identities.
• Appearance management allows them to anticipate what identities they would like to have in a social situation, so they can present themselves accordingly to others.
• “All the world’s a stage

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts” – ‘As You Like It’, Act 2, scene, Shakespeare.

• Is all the world a stage, with all people as performers of roles? In looking at self concept and appearance, we have seen that clothes most likely represent more in our daily personal and social lives than costumes for performances before others. Yet appearance management as a form of behaviour may be characterized in part by performance of the self in context.
• The social- psychological perspective in sociology known as dramaturgy draws analogies between human behaviour and the theatre.