You are what you wear: How fashion impacts our mental well-being

 Getting dressed in the morning: it's a task we do daily, some more consciously than others. We get dressed for work in the morning, choose casual clothes for lunch with a friend or maybe dress up for dinner in the evening. And with each outfit we — intentionally or unintentionally — communicate non-verbally to the outside world.

It's no question that what we wear is who we are because fashion is a way for us to express ourselves, our identity and even how we feel. The clothes we wear daily reflect the way we want others to perceive us and how we see ourselves. Clothes even influence our cognitive abilities.

In 2012, researchers from Northwestern University in the US found that wearing specific articles of clothing had an effect on the wearer's psychology and performance. The researchers concluded that clothes have a symbolic meaning. When we wear an article of clothing with a specific meaning, these clothes can influence our psychological state. It's called "enclothed cognition."

For example, a lab coat is associated with intelligence and scientific thinking. When a person wears a lab coat, these characteristics symbolized by the coat seem to have positive effects on their performance of specific tasks, according to the researchers. The study results show that what we wear, and the symbolic meaning we associate with specific fashion items, has measurable effects on our mental state. 

"This experiment really shows how clothes can affect our attention, how we feel about ourselves and our competencies," says Camay Abraham, who has a Master degree in Applied Psychology in Fashion from the London College of Fashion.

These effects can be positive, but also negative. "It could mean a negative state of being if the item in question is known to be associated with a negative construct," says Abraham. So "enclothed cognition" is a two-way street, just like our daily clothing choice can make us feel good or bad.

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