Why Improve Your Style?
Focusing on fashion often gets disregarded by men - myself included for a time. It’s thought of as superficial, feminine, and expensive. But this isn’t true. Fashion is expressive, empowering, and you don’t need lots of money to dress well. The good news is that if you put effort into improving your style, you’ll stand out. Transforming my wardrobe and developing my own style has changed the way I see myself and how others perceive me. I’m sure it’ll do the same for you.
Here are three reasons improving your style is important:
Dressing well gives you confidence
How you dress affects your mental state, behavior, and performance. In a study conducted at Northwestern University, researchers found that participants performed better at cognitive tasks when wearing a lab coat compared to those that don’t. Participants associated lab coats with intelligence, precision, and science. And when they wore the lab coat, they experienced those traits. This is called Enclothed Cognition.
Clothing has the power to make you feel different and confident. Wearing a well-tailored suit makes you feel competent, wearing a dry-fit shirt and compression shorts makes you feel athletic, and wearing your favorite shoes and leather jacket makes you feel like a badass.
People judge based on appearance
In an ideal world, people will judge you based on your character rather than your outward appearance. The reality is that people don’t and won’t. Many things can be inferred based on how you dress: your occupation, your interests, and your personality. Even if you don’t care about what you wear, that suggests something about you. Why didn’t you wear a burlap sack instead? Why not wear a jumpsuit? Why wear a T-shirt and Jeans? It may suggest humility, rejection of social status, or that you’ve prioritized other things in life.
What’s empowering about fashion is that, unlike many aspects of our appearance, you can control how you dress. Fashion offers a way to use appearance and first impressions to portray yourself however you desire - a form of soft power. Whatever it is you want to be, whatever you want to accomplish, you can use clothing to get you there.
Clothing has the ability to make us feel different and make others feel different about us. Wearing a suit may exude an air of authority, a uniquely ct shirt suggests rejection of societal norms, and a well-fitting shirt may turn on your date.
Your outfit is a biography
Style is a way of saying who you are without having to speak. - Rachel Zoe
Fashion is an art that everyone participates in. What you wear reflects who you are. And the best part is you can choose to be whoever or whatever you want. You can use your clothing as a canvas to express yourself — show different styles, tell a story, or represent your personality.
My style is my story. It’s a reflection of who I was, who I am, and who I want to be. In the past, I was an engineering student, a musician, a breakdancer, a Torontonian. Currently, I’m a Technologist, a Writer, a Filipino-Canadian, a New Yorker. To craft a stylish wardrobe means to infuse my story into the different pieces, I want to honor my roots, and dress like the person I want to become. To me this is what fashion and being stylish means to me.