Is Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day the Way of the Future?

 I recently wrote about a friend of mine at school who changed her style every day. One day she would come in dressed in a preppy Heathers style outfit, in pastel hues and a Ralph Lauren jumper tied around her shoulders. The next day she'd be rocking an old school hip hop theme in a three stripes adidas tracksuit and baseball cap with gigantic gold hoop earrings. When you next saw her she would float in wearing 70s flares and a skinny t-shirt, looking like one of Charlie\s Angels with perfect swishy hair and glossy smile. This kind of dressing obviously takes a lot of thought and planning. It must have taken hours to get her outfits so perfectly aligned to each theme, even down to the smallest accessory. Either she was a stylist extraordinaire, or she had a lot of time on her hands.

Outfit planning can be stressful

For people interested in fashion and who enjoy fashion, outfit planning is one of the joys of getting dressed, but also one of the biggest stresses. How many times have we stood in front of a mirror on a Friday night, huge pile of rejected clothes on the bed, trying to decide which outfit looks best, only to return, 2 hours later, to the first thing you tried on?

Outfit planning can most certainly be a pain. Especially if you are someone who doesn't have a lot of time on their hands. If you were say, Mark Zuckerberg for instance, or someone like Steve Jobs, whose every waking moment is carefully planned from the second you woke up, to the moment you went to bed, having to factor in an hour or even half an hour, hell even 10 minutes where you might have to decide what to wear for the day, there are probably a million other things you'd consider more important that you could be doing with that time. Your morning schedule might look something like thins:

5.15am Wake Up, greet the day, be served a green tea, Apple Cider Vinegar water and a protein shake by the maid

5.40am Practice 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation

5.50am 30 minutes on the running machine whist 'running through' the days planning with your PA

6.20am Shower, shave, etc

6:45 Breakfast, served to you by the maid, porridge, fruit, wheat free, gluten free toast

7.00am Get dressed

7:01am Open your emails, take your first business calls

7:10am Fire Jim from accounting and promote Daphne into Jim's post while having first massage of the day

7:40am Business meeting with CEO of Chinese branch of operations

8:10am Business meeting with Sarah, Joe and Mo from Design Team. Shoot down 6 months of their  hard work on what colours the new range of phones should be. Rose gold is officially out you tell them 

8:13am Call one of your underlings to fire Mo because you didn't like how sad he looked when you told him rose gold was dead

8:15am Car arrives to take you into office. You send it away and decide you want to cycle in today.

It's only 8.15, you've accomplished more in 3 hours than most have in their week. Where in your day can you fit in 'choosing your outfit.? Sure you could have someone else do it for you  - you could easily afford to have your own personal stylist at hand every hour of the day, but what kind of control freak would you be (and people like Mark and Steve undoubtedly are) if someone else was choosing your outfits for you every day? You wouldn't even let your mum dress you after the age of 2, you couldn't stand the thought of someone else having that much control over your image now.

So what do the Marks and Steve's of the world do? Rather than wasting your time or mental effort on something so trivial as what to wear and getting dressed, they simply wear exactly the same thing every day.

Inside Mark Zuckerberg's wardrobe

Getting to look inside a billionaire's wardrobe is not an everyday occurrence. When in June 2017, after the birth of his daughter, Mark Zuckerberg invited us all to do just that, , the entire world scrutinised it minutely. We wondered whether there might be bespoke big cat-style pinstripe outfits available. A row of Patek Philippe timepieces? Goldfish-filled glass platform heeled shoes? In fact, rather boringly, it was none of the above. The Facebook co-founder disclosed his wardrobe in a post -  on Facebook - in which he joked about confronting a difficult sartorial decision on his first day back at work following parental leave. Rather than flashy luxury clothing, Zuckerberg's wardrobe consisted entirely of grey marl T-shirts and zip-up hoodies. The morning routine of an entrepreneurial genius appears to be designed to eliminate the time wasted each day selecting how to change clothing. Presumably also delineating that when one reaches the wealth ranks of a Zuckerberg, one can wear whatever one fancies, quite frankly. The 31-year-old has seldom been photographed wearing anything different, as this is the unofficial uniform of IT start-ups. However, eradicating any traces of colour fluctuation is a daring new step. Zuckerberg's reasoning for his super-minimalist, frugal stance on clothing was quite straightforward, is it that he has no fashion sense? Is it a personal branding thing? He claims:

“I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,”….

Similarly, ex-President Barrack Obama always wore a grey or blue suit with a bluish tie. His reasoning:

“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia..”

Steve Jobs in his famed outfit

The person who first popularised the idea of wearing the same thing every day was in fact, Steve Jobs with his black turtleneck, blue Levi jeans and New Balance sneakers.. He argued that the less time spent on rudimentary tasks such as choosing your clothes or what you're going to have for breakfast every day, the more time and brain power you have for more important decisions.

But is it actually true? Does cutting down the choices you make in any given day allow you to reserve your brainpower for more important matters?

Decision fatigue — or, more precisely, cognitive fatigue — is a well-documented psychological condition. It was initially found in individuals suffering from cognitive impairments as a result of a neurological disease, trauma, developmental problem, or brain injury. When confronted with everyday decisions, psychologists discovered that persons who have experienced such issues or trauma frequently tyre more readily and faster than the general population.

Psychologists argue however, that an average healthy person would not normally suffer from such cognitive deficits. We make hundreds of decisions daily. It has been proven that the average person makes 180 decisions a minute while driving. If you're cognitively healthy, having to make one or two less insignificant decisions a day isn't really going to have much impact on your overall brainpower.

Psychologist Dr John M. Grohol argues that decision fatigue cannot be applied to choosing clothes:

"Decision fatigue usually hits people when they are faced with a decision with nearly endless, previously-unknown options. Shopping for a new car, planning a wedding, or finding a new perfect pair of jeans, most people don’t realize all the choices they have to make before prior to the effort. It also appears to be a cumulative effect — the longer you are in the process, the more fatiguing the effort becomes.

But when it comes to picking out our clothes for the day, it’s not the same as decision fatigue studied in research — after all, we’ve already chosen our own wardrobes. That makes the decision qualitatively different than the kinds of decisions faced by people who experience decision fatigue in the many psychological experiments conducted on the phenomenon."

Moreover, he argues it is easy enough to cherry pick a few rich people who abide by a particular habit. But a quick look at the top of Forbes rich list would show just as many people who do change their outfits every day. There are also just as many unsuccessful people who wear the same clothes every day to no positive effect. 

Is choosing not to make a decision regarding what to eat or wear simply cognitive laziness? Possibly. There is no doubt however, that some routine in one's life is a healthy thing. Getting up every day, taking a shower, brushing your teeth - all good things.

Black Mirror episode outfits look startlingly similar to Zuckerberg's wardrobe

However, Is sameness for the sake of sameness a somewhat vacuous goal? Undoubtedly, Dr Grohol argues, especially if it's in the false belief that it will somehow make you more successful in life. After all, did someone not once say that 'variety was the spice of life'? For those of us lucky enough to have a wardrobe of more than just grey t-shirts, there is a certain joy in opening a wardrobe and seeing a burst of different colours, textures, shapes and styles. Where is the joy in a grey uniform? Zuckerberg's wardrobe has echoes of the kind of wardrobes featured in a distopean future dreamed up in an episode of Black Mirror. 

In Michael Ofei's 'An argument for wearing the Same Clothes Every Day', he argues that as well as convenience and simplicity, a uniform represents 'equality and unity across an organisation'. Moreover, he points out, "With a globally standardised uniform, we would no longer be judged on what we wear. Instead, it will be our personality and ideas that create a sense of individuality." It's an interesting point, but not without undertones of a North Korean prison camp. Surely individualised fashion is what makes us human.

It has also been argued that the whole idea of Steve Jobs creating a look due to decision fatigue, is in fact a myth. According to Walter Isaacson’s fully-authorised biography of Steve Jobs, his choice for clothes had less to do with minimalism and more to do with becoming an icon.

In the book, Jobs explains:

On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony’s chairman Akio Morita why everyone in the company’s factories wore uniforms. He told Jobs that after the war, no one had any clothes, and companies like Sony had to give their workers something to wear each day. Over the years, the uniforms developed their own signatures styles, especially at companies such as Sony, and it became a way of bonding workers to the company. “I decided that I wanted that type of bonding for Apple,” Jobs recalled.

Sony, with its appreciation for style, had gotten the famous designer Issey Miyake to create its uniform. It was a jacket made of rip-stop nylon with sleeves that could unzip to make it a vest. So Jobs called Issey Miyake and asked him to design a vest for Apple, Jobs recalled, “I came back with some samples and told everyone it would great if we would all wear these vests. Oh man, did I get booed off the stage. Everybody hated the idea.”

In the process, however, he became friends with Miyake and would visit him regularly. He also came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself, both because of its daily convenience (the rationale he claimed) and its ability to convey a signature style. “So I asked Issey to make me some of his black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made me like a hundred of them.” Jobs noticed my surprise when he told this story, so he showed them stacked up in the closet. “That’s what I wear,” he said. “I have enough to last for the rest of my life.”

Jobs developed a personal uniform to build his brand.

Alice Gregory, a writer in Brooklyn, also advocates for a personal uniform, she states:

"Wearing a uniform is also a way of asserting your status as a protagonist. This is the reason why characters in picture books never change their clothes: Children—like adults, if they’d only admit it—crave continuity. We recognise Babar in his green suit and crown, Eloise in her suspendered jumper and Madeline in her little yellow raincoat."

Babar in his green suit and crown is instantly recongnisable

And then there is the whole argument of frivolous fashion and wastefulness which is no doubt a serious issue. Landfills full of unwanted cheap sweat shop garments are surely a worse image of our future than a wardrobe full of grey t-shirts?

Perhaps the best approach is some sort of middle ground. 

On the one hand, keeping up with rapid fashion trends and amassing an overflowing wardrobe of clothing only for the sake of expressing your personality is extravagant and unsustainable. 

On the other hand, having a worldwide standardised uniform, as seen in fictional universes in books and films, demonstrates unity, but it is just not practical in the reality we live in today, nor is it, well, fun. 

A personal uniform is a good balance between simplicity and individuality. Investing the effort to create a dependable "superhero" costume is an excellent approach to not only promote your brand, but also allow you just enough room to express yourself creatively through your clothes without being a slave to fashion. Quality over quantity, creativity over repetitiveness, and pink sequin jackets over grey marl t-shirts.