Clothing

Question of The Day for August 27, 2012 ~ How Your Clothing Tells Others About You

What do you think your clothing tells others about you?

I put on whatever is at the top of my clothes pile.

Just how shallow have we, as a society, become, if we honestly think that the superficial clothing that we wear, something we can change in a few seconds, tells us anything meaningful about who the person under the clothes is?

The very idea just boggles me.

It is utter nonsense.

Yet it is a nonsense that the advertising and fashion industries have effectively sold us.

Many of us seem happy to buy it, because it gives us a simple way of distinguishing between those like us and those unlike us.

Such a very strange way of thinking !!!

[followed by]

Hi Mendy

I have absolutely no problem with people being creative with their clothing, in fact I delight in it. My wife and daughter are both extremely creative.

The issue for me is just about how we interpret that.

Being creative, and creating a world that delights the eye, is a great thing to do. I do truly enjoy and marvel at many of the creations I see.

What I take issue with is the tendency of people to draw conclusions about the people below the clothes, based only upon the clothes.

There is a relationship, certainly, and in most cases, not a very deep one.

Having lived most of my life in rural New Zealand, one of the things I have noticed is that when you meet a group of men working on a farm, the one in the oldest and shabbiest looking clothes is most likely to be the wealthiest, they tend to have used their resources wisely, spending as little money as necessary, and accumulating as a lifetime habit. The ones with the flashiest clothes and smartest cars tend to be mortgaged to the eyeballs. And neither of those things is certain, just a sort of average thing.

There used to be a joke amongst a group of us that only millionaires are allowed to use bailing twine to hold up their trousers (like they have somehow earned the right, socially).

I love that Ailsa is creative with her clothing, and looks great.

I am also happy that she worked out very early in our relationship that she can get me to wear exactly what she wants by the simple expedient of putting it on top of the pile on my clothing shelf in the wardrobe. That makes us both happy, she gets to see what she likes, and I don’t have to think about it at all.

I don’t buy any clothes unless she is there to decide if she likes them or not, as she is the one that has to look at them, not me (I just wear them).