How to Dress for Who You Want to Become

Clothing imbued with symbolic meaning can actually change how we think and act.

Posted November 23, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

As the last rays of late autumn sunlight hit our windows in the morning, the temperature tells a different story. Winter is approaching—graceful, inevitable, and gently nudging us toward thicker fabrics and more layers.

We reach for warmth first. But we also reach for something else: identity . Clothing is one of the few everyday choices that must balance practicality, self-expression, and the quiet hopes we harbor for how we want to show up in the world.

And during this season—one centered on gratitude , reflection, and preparing for a new year—it’s natural to ask a deceptively simple question:

How should we dress to feel good, do better, and show up as the person we want to become?

That’s where enclothed cognition offers a surprising and empowering answer.

The Psychology of What You Wear

The term enclothed cognition was coined by behavioral scientists Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky in their 2012 paper . Their core finding was striking: The very clothes you wear can influence how you think, feel, and behave —but only when two forces come together:

When participants wore a lab coat described as a “doctor’s coat,” their attention sharpened, compared to simply seeing the coat or compared to wearing a coat described as a “painter’s coat.” Both meaning and wearing mattered.

Since then, the field has matured. Today, the evidence clusters into three powerful mechanisms:

1. Symbolic Power: Clothing Activates Identity. Clothing operates like a psychological prime you literally put on your body. Formal attire, for example, pushes people toward more abstract, big-picture thinking—a higher “construal level”—as documented by Slepian and colleagues (2015) . Uniforms activate professional norms and strengthen identity internalization. Even kids show more grit and perseverance in solving a puzzle when donning a Batman costume, as recorded by Tod Herman in his book, The Alter Ego Effect.

What you wear flips mental switches. If you wear something that signals competence, focus, or leadership , your brain may follow suit.

2. The Enclothed Experience: Your Body Helps Your Mind. Clothing doesn’t just symbolize; it sensitizes . Fit, texture, structure, posture—all of these influence emotional and physiological states. Kraus and Mendes (2014) showed that clothing associated with higher social status changes physiological arousal and self-presentation—when comparing e.g. a business suit with sweatpants. (This study may have to be redone after the lockdown, because the upper classes have been known to wear sweatpants too.)

Bottom line: The body and the mind are a feedback loop, and clothing is one of the easiest levers we control. When you feel put together, your nervous system registers it.

3. Social Feedback: Our Clothes Speak Before We Do. Clothing shapes how others see us—and how we then see ourselves. Men in bespoke suits, differing only subtly from a comparator off-the-peg suit, were judged more positively in several categories of competence and success (but not in trustworthiness). Women in more high-powered roles were judged more competent when conservatively dressed (i.e. higher buttoned blouses and longer hemlines) while there was no effect for lower-powered roles.

Most interesting may be how much your shoes tell about you . A new group of (research) participants accurately judged the age, gender , income, and attachment anxiety of shoe owners based solely on the pictures.

We co-create our identity with our environment. Clothing is one of the earliest signals in that social exchange.

Here is the elegant, evidence-based takeaway: Dress for the role you want to strengthen in yourself. Not for a brand, not for a trend—for the psychological state you want to inhabit.

You can use clothing strategically—not performatively, not for external validation, but as a gentle cue to yourself.

A Brand-Free Fashion Guide for the Season

This season, as consumer culture hits its peak, here’s an alternative approach: You don’t need more things. You need more meaning in the things you wear.

Facebook /LinkedIn image: muse studio/Shutterstock

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Rebekka Grun von Jolk, Ph.D., is an expert on love data and economics, with research experience in behavioral economics, sociology, and empirical psychology.

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.