What You Wear Can Signal a Part of Your Identity (2024)

A law school professor I knew dressed casually for his classes, often in sandals and a T-shirt. However, the semester Steve co-taught a class, he wore traditional law school professor attire: a long-sleeve collared shirt, bowtie, and dark jacket. Why the wardrobe change? Because his co-teacher was female, he said.

“To be taken seriously by the students, she couldn’t dress casually. I had to dress up since she couldn’t dress down.”

In the short story The Czar’s Soliloquy, Mark Twain writes:

“[One] realizes that without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes are the man ... There is no power without clothes. It is the power that governs the human race. Strip its chiefs to the skin, and no State could be governed; naked officials could exercise no authority ... A policeman in plain clothes is one man; in his uniform he is ten ... No great title is efficient without clothes to support it."

Twain wasn’t completely right. "Law professor" is a prestigious title, yet Steve was not only tenured but also respected by his students. Perhaps today Twain would revise his observation by noting that clothes are more important in making the woman than the man. The global organization Dress for Success, for example, is aimed at low-income women. As stated by Dr. Diane M. Turner-Bowker, “Clothing plays a role in impression formation and may affect poor women’s ability to obtain a good job.” There are similar programs for men, but they are on a much smaller scale.

Although men may have more flexibility in what they can wear, their choices are also circ*mscribed. Just think how there is a greater variety of clothing in a women’s shop than in a men’s shop—a greater choice of color, style, and patterns. A female executive may wear a red blazer but not a male executive, for example.

The point is that dress functions as a form of non-verbal communication. It signals a person’s identity that is a combination of cultural imperatives or prohibitions (somber clothes for a funeral), group identity (leather jacket and jeans for bikers), or personal choices (skirt or slacks).

A set of New Yorker cartoons, “What Your First-Date Clothing Says About You,” captures (humorously, of course) the way in which dress signals intentions. Wearing sweatpants signals you’re looking for something casual. The thought bubble adds: “The hottest spot in the city is my living room couch.” An all-black outfit says you’re prepared to mourn the loss of two hours. The thought bubble adds, “Really dying to get back into sweatpants.”

Wardrobes—and hairstyles—matter. In 1967, I wasn’t considered suitable teacher material because my beard said to my interviewers that I was counter-cultural. Today the semiotics of facial hair is more complicated. Times change, attitudes shift, and culture morphs. What remains stable is that how we present ourselves is a mix of cultural conformity, group solidarity, and personal expression.

Dress codes are instituted to enforce group norms, whether in schools or businesses. When the dress rule is challenged, often courts are called on to determine whether the codes are within the parameters of the law.

What we wear is a matter of identity. But which identity are we to assume? What happens when a person’s gender or racial identity—two core social identities—is at odds with a school or employer’s dress code? For example, a binary-identifying student who otherwise presents as a male decides to wear a dress in school. Is identity as a student more important than that of gender? Or say a white-shoe lawyer decides to wear locs to work. Is their identity as a corporate lawyer more important than their identity as a Black person?

As stated by Seattle University Professor of Law Janet Ainsworth in her article “What’s Wrong with Pink Pearls and Cornrow Braids? Employee Dress Codes and the Semiotic Performance of Race and Gender in the Workplace,” conflict between employers and employees over dress codes serves both as an arena for worker resistance to employer assertions of control over the construction and performance of their "true selves" and as a prime site for cultural contests over the meaning and instantiation of race and gender identities more generally in the modern world.

Ainsworth points out that courts most often side with employers, thereby asserting the primacy of the identity of “worker” over that of racial or gender identity. Dress codes in school are more hotly contested and complex legal cases, with courts sometimes siding with students and sometimes with school administration. The American Civil Liberties Union writes, “What this boils down to is that public schools’ authority to impose dress codes is not unlimited.”

Cultural, institutional, and personal concerns are evident in matters of what we wear. A good society provides much latitude for individual choice; an ethical person acknowledges the legitimate limitations society imposes upon individuals. What we wear is the manifestation of shifting ground of what we mean by identity in a quickly changing modern world.