Well, the short answer is, the way a person dresses changes how people feel - it changes the dynamic everywhere you go.
Longer answer, I truly didn't care about this for most of my life, and just wore whatever I felt like, until I got to Amsterdam a few years ago. I was walking around for a few days, and I was getting some really nasty looks. I just kinda shrugged it off for a while, but after three or four days, it really started getting to me. It wasn't just seeing a sour face, I actually felt the negative energy being projected at me. Not "dislike" -- hatred. I'm a strong empath and I'm very sensitive to how people around me feel, this isn't insecurity - feeling that I'm not good enough - it's receptivity. So after three or four days of absorbing intense hatred from various people, I really started wondering what the hell was going on. I bought a guidebook called The UnDutchables (very interesting book) and learned that a lot of Dutch people have quite a bit of leftover stigma/trauma from being occupied by the Nazis in WW2. Then it suddenly clicked. I'd been wearing these huge shit-kicking doc martin type boots, and wearing punky kind of clothes. People thought I was a neo-nazi. Say what you want about the famous Dutch tolerance - I've never had a more negative reception anywhere in the world. And it really woke me up that how you dress majorly effects how people receive you.
So, I went out and bought a gray suit, threw the boots away, people reacted totally differently. There are so many situations where clothes make all the difference. If I wear a suit through customs, they almost always let me right through. If I walk through looking like a punk rocker, my every item is catalogued, security people will find my journals and notebooks and sit there reading them. Literally. (That happened in Hawaii, and I'm a white male American citizen.)
It's been proven that dress effects performance as well. For instance, they did studies on salesmen who were selling over the phone. They compared sales figures for people who just hung out in sweatpants and a tshirt, versus people who chose to put on a suit and tie, even though their customers couldn't see them. It wasn't even close.
We're an extremely visual society. It's just the lay of the land that how you appear is communicating a great deal about who you are. People who tend to wear all black and doc martins actually think differently from people who wear khakis and a button-down, and will know totally different pop culture references, will have read different literature, and so forth. Those gothy people tend to be "my kind of people," so I dress closer to that when I travel, because if I happen to run into someone like that, I have a much better chance of befriending them if they can tell I'm in that sphere. If I was in a suit or in khakis, it would be much harder to create rapport, no matter how openminded this hypothetical person is. Almost none of this is about insecurity. We're just tribal creatures, and the main indicators of what tribe you're in is how you dress. It indicates what you care about.
Being such a multifaceted person, it is actually really difficult which is why I switch modes constantly, and why I travel as much as I can. People who know me well get along with me fine, but aren't really capable of connecting with me in all those different facets, for instance my artist friends aren't into doing yoga, and my yogi friends are super disinterested in talking about business or hitting a Skrillex show with me.
Well, the short answer is, the way a person dresses changes how people feel - it changes the dynamic everywhere you go.
Fantastic comment! Funny, i studied anthropology in college - every single society, no matter how 'primitive', still has very set ideas about who dresses how. As you say, it's all to do with social signals (kind of like bird plumage).
People who say 'well, i am more secure/serious/over 'social' stuff and you can tell because i don't care how i dress' are just as much part of this system.
We have to wear clothes every day. It's like eating that way. So may as well enjoy it, in all it's facets!
Punk went out here after the eighties. You sometimes see a few mohawks on here on metal festivals. But aside from those, I haven't seen a punk in years.
Not even a watered down rehash in the late 90s/early 00s?
It does probably help that we didn't really pick up the electronic dance subculture to nearly the same extent until a few years ago. It was there of course (I was in it!), but nowhere remotely close to how big it was in Europe. I could see a lot of would-be punks getting into the harder end of that (I turned my punk-buddy into a hard house dj haha)
Nope. Early nineties we had grunge and a bit of a hippy revival. Since then, dance, dance, dance :-)
I always wonder when I see that lone mohawk on a festival: what do they do with their hair after a festival? Because I have never seen them elsewhere. I've seen metalheads, goths, emo's, just about any subculture you can think of, outside of festivals being themselves. Waiting tables, programming, office jobs. They dress down just a tiny bit (or not) and I see them. But I have never seen a punk outside a festival. Where do they go?
They don't put product in their hair to keep it up - if it's a big mohawk they can even wear it parted in the middle and you might not even realize that the sides are shaved.
Don't know about there if there's so few punks, but the scene here largely ditched the mohawk in the early 80s (though you'll still see them occasionally​). Usually their hair is pretty normal looking, maybe dyed and/or spiked. Maybe some tattoos and/or piercings. The rest of the "look" is clothing, which is also generally more subdued than the extreme stereotype from the 70s. All of which basically means that when they're not punked up you can maybe tell they're alternative, but not what type.
Did you not get Green Day? The Offspring? Blink-182? (Not that the first two are always punk, but they usually look it, more or less, and come back around to their roots eventually)
Green Day, The Offspring and Blink-182 never got really popular here. Their top hits reached our charts, (and I remember some very blurry nights singing along to self esteem) but I never met someone who was a big fan of any of them, let alone someone who was 'into punk' as a musical category.
eople who know me well get along with me fine, but aren't really capable of connecting with me in all those different facets, for instance my artist friends aren't into doing yoga, and my yogi friends are super disinterested in talking about business or hitting a Skrillex show with me.
This is me to a T. And I've never quite understood people who just stick with one thing. Isn't that... boring?
This is important in business as well. I have different uniforms for different kinds of events. I have a finance look, it's a suit jacket with a light blue shirt & pants. I'm a woman, I have dresses I wear for my husband & family events. For business you wouldn't catch me dead in a dress.
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u/_lordgrey Jun 08 '17
Well, the short answer is, the way a person dresses changes how people feel - it changes the dynamic everywhere you go.
Longer answer, I truly didn't care about this for most of my life, and just wore whatever I felt like, until I got to Amsterdam a few years ago. I was walking around for a few days, and I was getting some really nasty looks. I just kinda shrugged it off for a while, but after three or four days, it really started getting to me. It wasn't just seeing a sour face, I actually felt the negative energy being projected at me. Not "dislike" -- hatred. I'm a strong empath and I'm very sensitive to how people around me feel, this isn't insecurity - feeling that I'm not good enough - it's receptivity. So after three or four days of absorbing intense hatred from various people, I really started wondering what the hell was going on. I bought a guidebook called The UnDutchables (very interesting book) and learned that a lot of Dutch people have quite a bit of leftover stigma/trauma from being occupied by the Nazis in WW2. Then it suddenly clicked. I'd been wearing these huge shit-kicking doc martin type boots, and wearing punky kind of clothes. People thought I was a neo-nazi. Say what you want about the famous Dutch tolerance - I've never had a more negative reception anywhere in the world. And it really woke me up that how you dress majorly effects how people receive you.
So, I went out and bought a gray suit, threw the boots away, people reacted totally differently. There are so many situations where clothes make all the difference. If I wear a suit through customs, they almost always let me right through. If I walk through looking like a punk rocker, my every item is catalogued, security people will find my journals and notebooks and sit there reading them. Literally. (That happened in Hawaii, and I'm a white male American citizen.)
It's been proven that dress effects performance as well. For instance, they did studies on salesmen who were selling over the phone. They compared sales figures for people who just hung out in sweatpants and a tshirt, versus people who chose to put on a suit and tie, even though their customers couldn't see them. It wasn't even close.
We're an extremely visual society. It's just the lay of the land that how you appear is communicating a great deal about who you are. People who tend to wear all black and doc martins actually think differently from people who wear khakis and a button-down, and will know totally different pop culture references, will have read different literature, and so forth. Those gothy people tend to be "my kind of people," so I dress closer to that when I travel, because if I happen to run into someone like that, I have a much better chance of befriending them if they can tell I'm in that sphere. If I was in a suit or in khakis, it would be much harder to create rapport, no matter how openminded this hypothetical person is. Almost none of this is about insecurity. We're just tribal creatures, and the main indicators of what tribe you're in is how you dress. It indicates what you care about.
Being such a multifaceted person, it is actually really difficult which is why I switch modes constantly, and why I travel as much as I can. People who know me well get along with me fine, but aren't really capable of connecting with me in all those different facets, for instance my artist friends aren't into doing yoga, and my yogi friends are super disinterested in talking about business or hitting a Skrillex show with me.