Gemma Spake

But on the other side, you also learn, yes, through positive things, also through negative things.

You learn what gets you teased, what elicits negative reactions.

Maybe it was wearing a crop top in your childhood and you were teased for it.

You were shamed for it.

Some kids said terrible things for you.

And so you grow up thinking you can't wear that and you never do.

Or you wear a type of

pet or a type of gene that ripped or gave you a rash and for some reason you've avoided that for the rest of your life, clothes carry learnt associations.

That is why certain clothes, like we were talking about, feel emotionally relevant because they are often tied to memories, the same memories that our identity is built on.

in fact researchers from the University of College London looked at this in great detail and they basically said in this article they wrote and I can't remember the name of it but they said that clothes are instruments for anchoring the self and remembering the past and by and through that they enhance our well-being they are like this weird rope that ties together who we want to be

who we are now and who we were in the past in like one long line.

Clothes are a mix of, yes, practicality and what's affordable, but also of mood and memory.

And that is constantly playing subconsciously in the background of the choices you make around fashion every single day.

It's incredibly emotionally evocative.

It's incredibly representative of the past.

It's why I think we struggle to throw out items that we don't wear anymore, but used to be our favorites.

It's why we have really distinct childhood memories, not just of moments, but of the clothes that we wore in them.

They are not neutral items.

Beyond these past memories, research also shows that your baseline personality can also predict how you will dress.

Essentially, there is this kind of theory that if you were to take somebody's outfit, you could pick it apart and basically make a composite of what their personality is like based on some pretty amazing correlations between personality attributes and clothing choices.