Not Just an Outfit: 4 Superpowers of Clothes

Anastasia Frolova
3 days ago
2 min read

I have always loved clothes, I just could not put into words what and why. Sometimes I would find a pair of fabulous socks and would not sleep until I had an entire outfit built around them.

Even when I buy trendy items, like a pair of massive, tractor-looking Prada shoes, it is never about fashion or trends. It just fits within my aesthetic preferences.

I have always been driven by strong contrasts, combining what at a glance seems conflicting: colours, fabrics, genres, balancing masculine and feminine. I call my personal style “a teenager meets an aunty” because sometimes I am in sweatpants and crop tops and other times I am rocking long A-line plissé skirts.

It is not confusion. I use clothes as a creative outlet. Every time I post my “She Ready” selfies, it is about the excitement of a well chosen outfit.

I have come to learn that some of my regular outfits are my go-to because they make me feel a certain way or highlight the parts of myself I like most.

Half my wardrobe is curated around my fit, Alo-wearing, iced americano drinking persona that comes out between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m. at the gym.

Those same outfits are the ones that give me the motivation and a boost of strength to perform at my best, crushing the PBs.

The moment I take up a new hobby, I start by assembling the right outfits for it. When I have an important meeting or a job interview, my mom always asks me what I am going to wear.

And while it all might sound silly, unimportant or even vain to most, there is some very real science behind it. Psychologists even have a term for this, “enclothed cognition”, which is how what you wear can shift how you think, feel and perform.

I have been using clothes as a tool for my entire life, and so have my mom and her mom; I come from a long line of clothes-loving women. Clothes carry four very real superpowers. Here are 4 superpowers of clothes:

Clothes can be used to elevate (or reflect) our mood.
They can be used to enhance our performance, from the gym floor to the boardroom and everything in between. In one experiment, people did better on attention tasks simply because they were wearing a white coat they believed belonged to a doctor, the same person in different clothing with a different level of focus.
Clothes have a significant impact on how others see us. Research on first impressions shows that people make judgements about confidence and competence in a fraction of a second based on appearance alone, which means your clothes are speaking before you do.
Clothes are one of the most powerful tools for self expression, and for communicating a part of, or even our whole, identity before we say a single word.