“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
This week, Virginia Woolf opened up my eyes to the importance of clothing. As a girl I do take a certain amount of pride in making sure that I look presentable to the outside world every morning and this typically includes selecting from my wardrobe and creating a suitable outfit (admittedly, some days I put more effort into this than others). However, in doing this I am usually thinking about how it will affect other people, never how it will affect me. After reading and discussing Woolf’s opinions of clothing in her book Orlando in class, I couldn’t help but glance down at my favorite pair of jeans, my striped camisole and my blue cardigan and wonder “to what degree has this affected me and my own worldview?”.
The first part of Virginia Woolf’s opinion is fairly easy to understand. Although we have all been taught from a young age that you should never judge a book by its cover, clothing and appearance are really the first things people notice about you. People that you talk to everyday also have your personality to work with, but all the people who don’t know you as well unintentionally derive a sense of who you are from how you look. I have always believed that someone’s appearance isn’t enough to judge anyone, so this idea initially clashed with my own beliefs. But what I realized is: of course this isn’t ideal, we would all like to think that we don’t make judgments (even small ones) about people that quickly, but we all do it.
For example, you see a teenager at the convenience store; let’s call him Dan. Dan is clothed in loose fitting sweatpants that seem dangerous close to falling to his ankles; an equally loose, wrinkled looking jacket; and baseball cap on his head turned at a 45 degree angle. Your first thoughts are undeniably revolving around the fact that this looks like a suspicious kid. If Dan was wearing instead, for example, a polo shirt with a well creased pair of khakis, your first impression would be much different, even though he is the same person.
Another thing to consider is that it might not be the actual clothes you are judging. Dan dressed in an unorthodox way, that is true, but you might not care about his sagging pants or his wrinkled jacket. In fact, what you might actually be analyzing is Dan’s choice to wear such clothing. When he woke up this morning, Dan actively made a choice to dress himself in saggy pants and a wrinkled jacket. Instead of pulling up his pants and straightening out his jacket, he is intentionally wearing them sloppily; this seems to give you a small window into his personality and his character. Woolf is saying exactly this: that what you choose to wear affects other people’s worldview of you.
However, what of the other part of Woolf’s quote? How does what you choose to wear affect your own worldview? How did my blue sweater make me think any differently about my surroundings, and how does Dan’s loose pant’s affect his? I’ll be honest: at first I didn’t get it. How could what I wear every day change the way I view things? It was an idea that stayed with me for a while, but I finally started to understand it.
There are actually a lot of ways that my choice (or Dan’s choice) of clothing affects my worldview. If I dress in my favorite outfit, it adds a certain pleasure to my day that I wouldn’t have without it. I can imagine, therefore, that when I am wearing an outfit I like I am friendlier to people around me and in a much more pleasant mood in general. Unintentionally, this could make my worldview more optimistic. Even more profoundly, as demonstrated above, what I choose to wear may have an effect on the way other people view me and even treat me. Therefore, my choice of jeans and a blue cardigan may invite a person with a similar taste for jeans and blue cardigans to come and compliment me. I have just made a new friend because of my outfit, and unintentionally altered my view of people in a very optimistic way. Inversely, Dan’s choice of saggy jeans and sideways baseball cap has an effect on the people around him in that it may make the convenience store’s owner follow him around the store because he looks suspicious. In the same way my new friend made my worldview more optimistic, Dan’s convenience store chaperone has made his worldview less optimistic. This same phenomenon occurred in Orlando when she started being waited on by men because of her skirts and dresses.
I see Virginia Woolf’s idea about clothing as by far the best thing I’ve learned all week in that it will make me put a lot more thought into how I dress myself in the future, and how I view my surroundings. This won’t mean an increased amount of vanity on my part, but rather an understanding for how I choose to dress will affect me and others, whether I realize it or not. It will also help me understand better my own reactions to what other people choose to wear. Am I judging their character based on what they are wearing? Should I be? I also see myself using this idea to become much more aware of shifts in my own worldview, because now that I know that something as ubiquitous as clothes can have such a drastic effect on the way I view the world around me, I will be much better able to gauge what else causes my worldview to change.
