Gemma Spake

Sometimes it's explicit like a slogan or a flag or a badge or like university merchandise, your literal favorite band on a t-shirt.

That's an explicit message of how you want to be seen.

And sometimes it is more coded.

It's like anytime you see somebody with like visible mending or stitching, that might be a sign of sustainability values or, you know,

of of class or income level or if you wear athletics wear outside of the gym you know that might be a sign of how you again how you want to represent yourself as a healthy person or if you blend typically masculine and typically feminine clothes together that signals gender non-conformity i'm giving you a lot of examples just to say that

The brain pays attention to this stuff and it pays attention to this stuff, yes, to categorize and to understand people, but mainly to use clothing as a mental shortcut and to be able to then identify the people you want to relate to or the tribe you want to belong to and those that you don't see yourself close to or as a part of.

Your brain often scans for these familiar cues because we're naturally attracted to similarity.

So somebody who is wearing a similar silhouette, similar colors, similar brands, a similar uniform to you, that is a visual marker of similarity.

somebody who's going to be part of your in-group.

And when we find them, that registers as safety and that registers as belonging.

One distinct example of this and how this happens is like, and how identity forms through clothes is like punk.

and what made punk so big predominantly in London in like the 70s and 80s it was like this counterculture reaction to economic and to like social unrest during this period and designers like Vivian Westwood like they really had their rise during this time because they utilized a lot of this like anti-monarchy anti-establishment anti-capitalist messaging that a lot of people were getting behind and kind of

flock to and like the androgynous silhouettes and the ripped clothing and the tartan that was ripped and the non-traditional hairstyles and the safety pin visual that represented to people a kind of philosophy and a kind of

sub-genre of people or people with certain beliefs that they wanted to gravitate towards.

And so it is used almost like a badge.

What we wear is symbolic of how we want to be seen, which then also impacts how people treat us.

And that in itself either strengthens our identity or diminishes it, or it either reinforces the cycle or diminishes

Again, through that learned association, it kind of teaches us or guides us into being somebody else.

Here's something super interesting.

A 2025 study found that we often dress more group aligned when we feel socially uncertain.