DAILY NAVY: HOW A DRESSED CODE MESSED WITH MY HEAD
There was a time when I wore navy every single day. Not because I liked it. Navy, in my opinion, is the nerdy older sibling of black.
A few years ago, I was Marketing Director for a Cornish health company where every employee wore navy. The intention was consistency, professionalism and a shared identity. Most colleagues welcomed the ease of choosing what to wear.
For me, however, it was a total disaster.
Every morning I'd try on various combinations of navy clothes, desperately searching for something that felt like me. I'd change two or three times before leaving the house feeling uncomfortable.
What you wear vs what you value
I wasn't functioning normally at work. I felt less powerful, less creative and more anxious. Making decisions seemed harder.
At the time, my strongest values were adventure, freedom and creativity. Yet every morning I was dressing in a colour that, to me, represented almost the exact opposite.
Of course, navy doesn't objectively mean restraint or conformity. For someone else, it might represent sophistication or authority. But the meaning I attached to it affected how I felt about myself and performed at work.
The psychological research
In 2012, researchers Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky introduced the concept of enclothed cognition, exploring how clothing can influence our psychological processes.
In one experiment, participants wearing a white coat described as a doctor's coat performed better on certain attention tasks than those wearing the same coat described as a painter's coat. The difference was the meaning attached to it.
This doesn't mean a particular outfit automatically makes us better at our jobs. But what we wear, and what we believe it represents, may influence how we think and act.
We're used to asking whether something flatters us or is appropriate for work. But what about asking ourselves something more?
- When do you feel most capable in your clothes, and what gives you that feeling?
- Are there situations at work where you dress as someone you think you should be, rather than who you are?
- Which parts of your personality do you express through clothing, and which do you suppress, especially at work?
- What does the outfit you reach for before a difficult meeting or presentation give you?
What does this mean for business?
We spend considerable time thinking about what helps people perform well at work. Yet clothing rarely enters that conversation beyond dress codes and professional appearance.
Our wardrobes contain clues about who we are, who we've been and who we feel we ought to be - like the jacket we wear when we need to feel brave. There are whole conversations about identity hiding behind our clothing choices.
Understanding these clues could help us dress more intentionally for work. And for employers, there's another question: if we want people to bring their strengths, personalities and creativity to work, how much freedom do we give them to express those things?
That doesn't mean abandoning dress codes or turning up to the office in sequins and latex.
It means recognising that clothing carries different psychological meanings for different people, and those meanings might matter more than we realise.
