If you want to get better at fashion because you want to unify external perception, I expect this to fail unless you want your perception to be a stereotype (scene clothes, suit-and-tie, fedora and neckbeard).
That would be roughly my recommendation: pick a universally-recognizable archetype and channel that archetype real hard. (This generalizes beyond “coolness” to other goals.) Otherwise, you’re just sending messages which are in-practice far more ambiguous and weak than you think to an audience which is small to begin with, and probably the number of people who will actually recognize what you intended the clothes to say is approximately zero.
Ah I think we disagree strongly here, this advice seems disastrous in basically all cases. Channeling an archetype very hard without deeply understanding that archetype makes you look like somebody who really wants to be perceived in a particular way, which makes it hard to be perceived in that way. See fedora neckbeard style. Some archetypes are formal and harder to mess up with lack-of-understanding, basically everybody can buy a nice suit with some research and lots of money, but even then, people who wear suits without understanding what a suit signals can be off-putting. The harder you try, the better your execution must be to get credit. Confidence is not enough, non-conformity on its own is not enough, you simply can’t do fashion in negative space.
Also see my point about sending messages to yourself—if you have an individual taste, then:
(1) You can use that taste to send signals to yourself, which is much better than sending them to others. I.e. if you have a sense of what a smart, kind person dresses like, then dressing like that is an effective reminder to be kind and smart.
(2) Even if people don’t share your taste they will often be able to recognize that your style is syntactically correct, and will give you social credit for this. Gibberish is often distinguishable from prose is distinguishable from poetry even in languages you don’t speak. Incidentally, I think this is an axis of coolness that you miss, and might even be the dominant axis.
(3.1) People will come to understand your taste better as they get to know you better, so you will get the strongest signalling effects on those you care the most about signalling.
(3.2) Since people like being in on social signalling, you will attract positive attention from those who get the most benefit from grokking your style. People too different from you will think it’s too much effort, people too similar to you will think it’s too easy, so dressing according to your own taste draws in people who share intuitions but not thoughts with you. These are the best people to know.
Channeling an archetype very hard without deeply understanding that archetype makes you look like somebody who really wants to be perceived in a particular way...
I mean, yes, obviously you need to understand the archetype deeply in order to channel it real hard? Ok, I suppose the existence of neckbeards indicates that that is not obvious and I should be explicit about it. But yeah, as with most things, one can certainly shoot oneself in the foot by not understanding what one is doing.
I guess you’re imagining that the advice would be “disastrous in basically all cases” because basically everyone who tries it will execute incompetently rather than competently? I’m not sure why you think that, “basically all cases” seems way too strong here. There are, for example, probably people who already understand the relevant social signals and are capable of competent execution, but either haven’t thought through what would actually benefit them most or haven’t been brave enough to actually do what would benefit them most.
Regarding your four specific points:
I totally buy the “signals to self” value proposition.
I also totally buy the “syntactic correctness” point, though I wouldn’t frame it that way in my head. Coherence of a look is recognizable and valuable even when it’s unclear what signal it sends.
The people who get to know me better are the least important for my clothes to signal to; they have loads of other data which will largely overwhelm my clothes. Clothes are most important for signalling to the people I know least.
I think you are vastly overestimating the amount of effort which other people will put into grokking one’s style, regardless of whether their taste is similar to one’s own. Especially since the people I care most about signalling to with my clothes are exactly those who I know least.
On a meta note: I’m responding to most of your points because I find this discussion interesting. But I know a dense thread like this can be tiring, so please don’t feel too obligated to respond if you find it draining.
Addressing the last first: No worries, we’re in the same boat here. Fortunately (unfortunately?) I am a sort of person who cannot actually run out of energy for detailed online dialog as long as the other person is thinking and raising interesting points, so feel free to respond as you see fit (and of course to ask me to explain differently or be less verbose if that’s easier for you, I think we’re both benefiting from this exchange and want to keep it that way.)
I guess you’re imagining that the advice would be “disastrous in basically all cases” because basically everyone who tries it will execute incompetently rather than competently? I’m not sure why you think that, “basically all cases” seems way too strong here. There are, for example, probably people who already understand the relevant social signals and are capable of competent execution, but either haven’t thought through what would actually benefit them most or haven’t been brave enough to actually do what would benefit them most.
Something like this is my view, yeah. There’s a relevant selection effect: plenty of people would benefit from just trying to emulate an archetype, but these are mostly people who are good at picking up non-verbal communication, so will learn a lot by just trying an outfit, noticing how they are perceived, repeating. The fashion advice I think people like this need is usually “care more about fashion”, sometimes “be more generous to yourself in your presentation”. But if you tell a person like this to just wear a bold established outfit and go from there, they’ll ask why they should care about what they wear, and if you can convince them to care, the explanation you give here could have been given in the beginning and they would get the same benefits.
Disastrous in all cases was an overstatement and I retract it, I should have said that I imagine this being disastrous when it’s impactful, but for most people it would not be impactful. One reason to believe this is that this is already what people do when they become interested in fashion. People tend to dress more “noisily” when they don’t have a sense of their ideal look yet, they mimic something they’ve seen. Maybe there’s an untapped group of people who have built intuition for fashion but aren’t brave enough to use it; I tend to think that lack of courage stems from lack of mastery, and a person who already has taste will feel just as fearful putting on a bad outfit as a good one, so why not choose a good one?
(I should note that it’s possible that I’m missing out on some groups of people here—if there are lots of people like you describe, who could basically dress well if only they tried to, they’d be hard to pick out for me. My model of fashion doesn’t predict that there should be many people like this, but in this arena it would be hard for me to falsify, so I’m largely explaining a prior here.)
Re points 3 and 4: I think I have two disagreements here? Mostly I’m speaking from personal experience, let me know if you think I’m miscalibrated as a result. But I don’t interact much with people I don’t know, so while wearing a noisy outfit might send strong signals to lots of people, those signals tend to be useless to me, I can’t follow up on them. By choosing colors and silhouettes and layers that make sense to me on a particular day, though, I can somewhat-reliably show my friends that I’m feeling energetic and we should do something interesting, or I’m feeling cozy and we should stay in and laugh together, and I can interpret the same from their outfits. We could of course establish these things verbally, but this would be more time-consuming, and verbal language is not well-fitted for such discussions. If you intended to wear the same thing every day this would change.
It’s also possible that I’m overestimating willingness to understand style, but I’ve made several friends and had more interesting conversations that started because of interest in another person’s outfit (or my own outfit), and I imagine most people (mostly women tbf) have had the same experience. This is more art than science; I rarely think that I want to learn another person’s style language, but I often like their ‘vibe’ and believe upon reflection that their clothing was the foundation of their vibe.
By choosing colors and silhouettes and layers that make sense to me on a particular day, though, I can somewhat-reliably show my friends that I’m feeling energetic and we should do something interesting, or I’m feeling cozy and we should stay in and laugh together, and I can interpret the same from their outfits.
I want to dig in on this. You of course have much more visibility into your own experience than I do, but just going by that description, my first guess would be that there’s a different thing actually going on.
Notably, “how energetic is <person> feeling” is one of the easiest things to read off of body language and speech patterns. There’s usually a pretty clear energy level being broadcast.
My guess would be:
you sometimes choose an outfit to match your intended energy level for the day
that outfit mostly acts as a self-signal, reminding you of your intended energy level for the day, so you act more in accord with that intended energy level
your friends then notice your energy level from all the clear nonverbal cues being sent, most of which is not the clothes themselves.
In particular, one prediction this model makes is that if you dress low-energy but feel/act high energy, your friends will mostly pick up high energy vibes rather than low energy vibes. They might not even notice the clothes mismatching the vibes.
Curious to hear how well that does/doesn’t feel like it fits your experiences.
There’s a relevant selection effect: plenty of people would benefit from just trying to emulate an archetype, but these are mostly people who are good at picking up non-verbal communication, so will learn a lot by just trying an outfit, noticing how they are perceived, repeating. [...]
I disagree with this model in multiple ways. I don’t currently have a short summary of that disagreement, so I’ll hit a bunch of points which might gesture in the right direction:
I expect that even people who are relatively good at picking up non-verbal communication will either get very few bits on how they are perceived (e.g. just general positive/negative valence and strength), or (more often) hallucinate a perception which is not there. The thing you’d want to get a read on is, like, what story/role/narrative the clothing is perceived as conveying, and that’s a relatively hard thing to get from a nonverbal read.
I don’t imagine feedback from other people being the main tool anyway. Like, the core way I imagine someone not falling into the neckbeard trap is by looking in the mirror and honestly asking themselves “does that person in the mirror actually give the vibe I’m looking for?”. The hard part is to pay attention to one’s gut and give an honest answer (and different people will be differently biased in that regard).
I guess feedback from others could substitute for the “look in the mirror”, especially if one does not trust oneself. But that substitutes trusting the feedback from others, which is itself tricky. Either one needs nonverbal reads on relatively detailed things like perceived story/role/narrative, or one needs to ask for verbal feedback in a way which both elicits the relevant information (which may be hard to articulate at all) and elicits honest answers.
Insofar as one does rely on feedback from others as a main driver of fashion choices… man, that feels like a trap. Someone who iterates on that feedback is going to shoot themselves in the foot, by e.g. doing things which offend nobody and therefore just look generic, or by doing things which seem kinda vaguely nice but don’t send a coherent message at all, or ???.
When I imagine someone who “understands the relevant things but hasn’t been brave enough to use it”, a central example would be someone who can look in the mirror and accurately assess whether they’ve got the vibe they want, but has mostly optimized their wardrobe based on valence-feedback from other people, without a coherent story/role/narrative. I want to tell that person “pick a strong archetype, make the person in the mirror vibe that archetype, be honest when assessing yourself, then be brave and go rock it”.
In particular, one prediction this model makes is that if you dress low-energy but feel/act high energy, your friends will mostly pick up high energy vibes rather than low energy vibes. They might not even notice the clothes mismatching the vibes.
Agree that this is the relevant experiment. I have unusually low body-language signalling intensity, so friends consistently could not read my vibe when I didn’t use fashion as a channel for nonverbal communication, but the self-signalling channel is hard to rule out explicitly. Not sure if the difference matters but I agree that the mechanism can be less straightforward here.
Regarding the rest, I agree that we have hit the main disagreement! (And it is difficult to articulate). I think it’s something to do with whether people who dress badly can tell why, or even that, they’re dressing badly. Your bullet points are all points of disagreement, most in straightforward ways, so I’ll only give voice to the interesting ones:
I think the neckbeard really truly believes that their outfit is vibe-appropriate. Perhaps more straightforwardly, the neckbeard agrees 100% with everything you’ve written thus far. When they notice negative reactions they tell themselves “well you can’t please everyone, and some people are bothered by anyone who stands out.” They put on an ironic graphic tee and a visor and a fedora and hold their katana and look in the mirror and think “fuck yeah I’m the coolest person ever, everyone wants to be like me.” (This is a fine thing to believe incidentally! I don’t have that much animosity for the neckbeard. But I think they end up confused and upset by the fact that people avoid them, and a better understanding of fashion could help.) What the neckbeard lacks is taste.
I think most people get lots of bits of information from incidental interaction. The way someone looks at you as you pass has very little informational content, but the difference between how you expect a first conversation to go and how it actually goes has a ton, and the average person can have lots of these if they wish. I don’t absorb these bits easily—I have some embodied cognition/theory of mind deviation that restricts me to just getting valence, which is why I had to do the exercise I recommended (or something like it, my way was less structured) to develop a fashion sense that I’m happy with. But in discussing fashion with others I’ve come to suspect that, like with body language, the things I discovered only by thinking very carefully are actually obvious to most people upon reflection.
Maybe a concrete deviation: It seems like you see fashion largely through the lens of offensive vs. nonoffensive? At least this seems to be the main failure mode you describe, when talking about how an outfit can fail. I do not think this is a useful frame—in my aesthetic language I call this quality “noise” (are we talking about the same quality?), the tendency of an outfit to attract attention and invite judgment of any valence, and it’s only the fourth or fifth thing that I care about when putting an outfit together. Is it your intuition that people fail to be fashionable by failing to be appropriately noisy? This would explain why bravery is the main requisite virtue to you while being nearly irrelevant to me.
I think the neckbeard really truly believes that their outfit is vibe-appropriate.
I buy that, but I think the cause is more like a motivated blindspot than lack of taste.
Let’s look at the classic meme:
This guy’s problem is not combining an ironic graphic tee with a visor and a fedora and a katana. The guy’s outfit is not the main problem. The guy’s taste is not the main problem. The problem is he weighs like 300 pounds. What he needs is Ozempic.
Now, what does that guy think when he looks in the mirror?
When that guy looks in the mirror, I think he’s telling himself that the outfit looks great, and he’s motivatedly-not-thinking about how overweight he is. He’s telling himself that the outfit puts him in the same bucket as a better-looking guy wearing that same outfit and facial hair.
That’s not a problem of lack of taste, that’s a problem of lack of self-honesty. He needs to be honest with himself about what he sees in the mirror.
Maybe a concrete deviation: It seems like you see fashion largely through the lens of offensive vs. nonoffensive? At least this seems to be the main failure mode you describe, when talking about how an outfit can fail. [...] Is it your intuition that people fail to be fashionable by failing to be appropriately noisy? This would explain why bravery is the main requisite virtue to you while being nearly irrelevant to me.
I wouldn’t say that’s the main lens I use in my head, but that is an accurate description of a major failure mode, plausibly the most common failure mode.
(Aside: I’d prefer the term “loud” over “noisy”, because “noisy” is easily confused with noise in the sense of signal vs noise, and signal vs noise is a very central concept here.)
I don’t think the meme is representative here though—the guy in the meme is fat because the internet hates this kind of person and also hates fat people. Memes that negatively portray their subject portray the subject as fat. To me the archetypal neckbeard looks like this:
This guy isn’t overweight, isn’t unattractive. He’s confident in his outfit, he’s smug, he’s trimming his facial hair just fine. He just thinks his outfit seems suave and intelligent, but it actually seems childish, patronizing, and incompetent.
And while weight is a relevant part of appearance, it can be separate from fashion. I think Jackie Gleason is the classic example:
Not every outfit or silhouette would work on Gleason here even if scaled up, he certainly couldn’t pull off aggressively-uncool counterculture looks, but he manages to dress well (at least in my view) and isn’t just adhering to the dominant archetype. (Orson Welles was also fat and stylish)
Maybe put another way: under your model, can the guy in the neckbeard meme dress well? If not, it seems like you have a model of attractiveness, but not of fashion. If so, it seems like “pick an archetype and embody it confidently, bonus points for noncomformity” is not a good enough description of your model, and I wonder (1) what other components your theory has and (2) what relative weight you attach to those components.
Those are useful examples, thanks. I’m gonna come at this from a different angle, but first to answer this question:
Maybe put another way: under your model, can the guy in the neckbeard meme dress well?
Unsure, either “no” or “it would be hard enough that I have no idea how he’d do it”. I do not think that makes this a model of attractiveness per se, rather I think every outfit has some level of attractiveness required to pull it off (which, for the worst outfits, may be beyond the attractiveness of any actual human). As the relevant section of the post said, attractiveness and charisma are necessary conditions.
Now back to the main cruxy part.
Suppose the neckbeard you linked to looks in the mirror and, in complete self-honesty, gets the vibe that he looks awesome. Like, he imagines someone else who looks just like that, and his gut response is “that guy looks awesome”. Well, as long as he’s being honest with himself… his own reaction is in fact extremely strong evidence that lots of other people would agree that he looks awesome. It’s very unlikely that he is so unique in his tastes (or lack thereof) that nobody else shares them. There may be lots of people who hate it, but at that point it is plausibly just correct to respond “well you can’t please everyone, and anyone who stands out is gonna bother some people”.
Personally, at this point I would tell him that he’s farther than he thinks from the best he could be doing, but yes there are probably many people who will in fact get a pretty good vibe from that outfit (again, assuming the premise that his own honest read was that it looks awesome). So at that point it’s down to numbers: just how many people would think it looks awesome, and how many would be driven away? In that guy’s case, I’d guess the “awesome” camp would be in the minority, but not so rare that it would never make sense to take the tradeoff (“better to be loved by a few and hated by many, than for everyone to feel nothing” as the saying goes).
This is importantly different from the fat guy in the meme! For that guy, the number of people who think he looks awesome is going to be very close to zero, and probably even in his own head he needs to motivatedly-ignore some things about the guy in the mirror in order to think he looks good.
Main point of all that: insofar as one is honest with oneself, one’s own reaction/vibe to a mirror is damn strong evidence of other peoples’ reaction/vibe. Probably at least a large minority will feel the same reaction/vibe, even if one lacks the majority’s taste.
And for most people, whatever reaction/vibe they get will basically match the reaction/vibe most other people would get; by definition most people are in the majority. If most people have the relevant taste, then most peoples’ honest vibe from the mirror will reflect that, and in that case the neckbeard is in the minority. If most people don’t have the relevant taste, then most peoples’ honest vibe from the mirror will reflect that, and in that case it’s fashion twitter which would be in the minority.
I think this is our empirical disagreement, so I’m not sure if conversation beyond this point is productive, but I’m glad we’ve pinpointed it. Concretely, I think this:
insofar as one is honest with oneself, one’s own reaction/vibe to a mirror is damn strong evidence of other peoples’ reaction/vibe.
is simply false, and is especially false for the sort of people who need fashion advice. There are some relevant nitpicks here, mainly that if reactions to an outfit are more than one-dimensional we shouldn’t expect a “majority” vibe to exist at all, but those only seem important because I think people are often very mistaken about how others receive us.
Beyond that there’s a mindset here that I think you should be wary of, or at least should emphasize more strongly so that others are wary of it:
There may be lots of people who hate it, but at that point it is plausibly just correct to respond “well you can’t please everyone, and anyone who stands out is gonna bother some people”.
This is plausibly correct, sure, but I don’t think it feels more correct in cases where it’s true compared to cases where it’s false. Naively chalking up another person’s negative impression of oneself to them being bothered by anybody who stands out is in my view the dominant failure mode for personality, it’s the thought-terminating cliche that stops disagreeable or reactively non-conformist people from performing useful introspection.
Earlier we talked about the information content of a person’s impression of one’s outfit. I expect that very few people can get enough bits out of people who strongly dislike their style to make reasonable judgments about why they bother some people. Thus the strength with which this response resonates is controlled more by one’s prior, which is controlled by these personality factors. Some people may need to hear this, sure, but I’d usually accompany it with “On the other hand, the most stylish people I know very rarely get strong negative reactions, draw a lot of positive attention, and are not optimizing for perceived status or polarization.”
This second point seems more like a values difference than an object-level disagreement, though. If the goal is to optimize for the number of people who see you as (ingroup-proximate + high-status) your advice becomes makes a little more sense, and I’d recommend approaching things differently but broadly adopting the more polarizing, counter-signalling approach (although this means you don’t get to choose the ingroup you’re proximate to! It’s just going to be Todd Phillips fans and co.) I just don’t think this is a worthwhile or efficient thing to optimize for in this medium, and I expect whatever you can accomplish in this way to not be worth the downsides.
That would be roughly my recommendation: pick a universally-recognizable archetype and channel that archetype real hard. (This generalizes beyond “coolness” to other goals.) Otherwise, you’re just sending messages which are in-practice far more ambiguous and weak than you think to an audience which is small to begin with, and probably the number of people who will actually recognize what you intended the clothes to say is approximately zero.
Ah I think we disagree strongly here, this advice seems disastrous in basically all cases. Channeling an archetype very hard without deeply understanding that archetype makes you look like somebody who really wants to be perceived in a particular way, which makes it hard to be perceived in that way. See fedora neckbeard style. Some archetypes are formal and harder to mess up with lack-of-understanding, basically everybody can buy a nice suit with some research and lots of money, but even then, people who wear suits without understanding what a suit signals can be off-putting. The harder you try, the better your execution must be to get credit. Confidence is not enough, non-conformity on its own is not enough, you simply can’t do fashion in negative space.
Also see my point about sending messages to yourself—if you have an individual taste, then:
(1) You can use that taste to send signals to yourself, which is much better than sending them to others. I.e. if you have a sense of what a smart, kind person dresses like, then dressing like that is an effective reminder to be kind and smart.
(2) Even if people don’t share your taste they will often be able to recognize that your style is syntactically correct, and will give you social credit for this. Gibberish is often distinguishable from prose is distinguishable from poetry even in languages you don’t speak. Incidentally, I think this is an axis of coolness that you miss, and might even be the dominant axis.
(3.1) People will come to understand your taste better as they get to know you better, so you will get the strongest signalling effects on those you care the most about signalling.
(3.2) Since people like being in on social signalling, you will attract positive attention from those who get the most benefit from grokking your style. People too different from you will think it’s too much effort, people too similar to you will think it’s too easy, so dressing according to your own taste draws in people who share intuitions but not thoughts with you. These are the best people to know.
I mean, yes, obviously you need to understand the archetype deeply in order to channel it real hard? Ok, I suppose the existence of neckbeards indicates that that is not obvious and I should be explicit about it. But yeah, as with most things, one can certainly shoot oneself in the foot by not understanding what one is doing.
I guess you’re imagining that the advice would be “disastrous in basically all cases” because basically everyone who tries it will execute incompetently rather than competently? I’m not sure why you think that, “basically all cases” seems way too strong here. There are, for example, probably people who already understand the relevant social signals and are capable of competent execution, but either haven’t thought through what would actually benefit them most or haven’t been brave enough to actually do what would benefit them most.
Regarding your four specific points:
I totally buy the “signals to self” value proposition.
I also totally buy the “syntactic correctness” point, though I wouldn’t frame it that way in my head. Coherence of a look is recognizable and valuable even when it’s unclear what signal it sends.
The people who get to know me better are the least important for my clothes to signal to; they have loads of other data which will largely overwhelm my clothes. Clothes are most important for signalling to the people I know least.
I think you are vastly overestimating the amount of effort which other people will put into grokking one’s style, regardless of whether their taste is similar to one’s own. Especially since the people I care most about signalling to with my clothes are exactly those who I know least.
On a meta note: I’m responding to most of your points because I find this discussion interesting. But I know a dense thread like this can be tiring, so please don’t feel too obligated to respond if you find it draining.
Addressing the last first: No worries, we’re in the same boat here. Fortunately (unfortunately?) I am a sort of person who cannot actually run out of energy for detailed online dialog as long as the other person is thinking and raising interesting points, so feel free to respond as you see fit (and of course to ask me to explain differently or be less verbose if that’s easier for you, I think we’re both benefiting from this exchange and want to keep it that way.)
Something like this is my view, yeah. There’s a relevant selection effect: plenty of people would benefit from just trying to emulate an archetype, but these are mostly people who are good at picking up non-verbal communication, so will learn a lot by just trying an outfit, noticing how they are perceived, repeating. The fashion advice I think people like this need is usually “care more about fashion”, sometimes “be more generous to yourself in your presentation”. But if you tell a person like this to just wear a bold established outfit and go from there, they’ll ask why they should care about what they wear, and if you can convince them to care, the explanation you give here could have been given in the beginning and they would get the same benefits.
Disastrous in all cases was an overstatement and I retract it, I should have said that I imagine this being disastrous when it’s impactful, but for most people it would not be impactful. One reason to believe this is that this is already what people do when they become interested in fashion. People tend to dress more “noisily” when they don’t have a sense of their ideal look yet, they mimic something they’ve seen. Maybe there’s an untapped group of people who have built intuition for fashion but aren’t brave enough to use it; I tend to think that lack of courage stems from lack of mastery, and a person who already has taste will feel just as fearful putting on a bad outfit as a good one, so why not choose a good one?
(I should note that it’s possible that I’m missing out on some groups of people here—if there are lots of people like you describe, who could basically dress well if only they tried to, they’d be hard to pick out for me. My model of fashion doesn’t predict that there should be many people like this, but in this arena it would be hard for me to falsify, so I’m largely explaining a prior here.)
Re points 3 and 4: I think I have two disagreements here? Mostly I’m speaking from personal experience, let me know if you think I’m miscalibrated as a result. But I don’t interact much with people I don’t know, so while wearing a noisy outfit might send strong signals to lots of people, those signals tend to be useless to me, I can’t follow up on them. By choosing colors and silhouettes and layers that make sense to me on a particular day, though, I can somewhat-reliably show my friends that I’m feeling energetic and we should do something interesting, or I’m feeling cozy and we should stay in and laugh together, and I can interpret the same from their outfits. We could of course establish these things verbally, but this would be more time-consuming, and verbal language is not well-fitted for such discussions. If you intended to wear the same thing every day this would change.
It’s also possible that I’m overestimating willingness to understand style, but I’ve made several friends and had more interesting conversations that started because of interest in another person’s outfit (or my own outfit), and I imagine most people (mostly women tbf) have had the same experience. This is more art than science; I rarely think that I want to learn another person’s style language, but I often like their ‘vibe’ and believe upon reflection that their clothing was the foundation of their vibe.
I want to dig in on this. You of course have much more visibility into your own experience than I do, but just going by that description, my first guess would be that there’s a different thing actually going on.
Notably, “how energetic is <person> feeling” is one of the easiest things to read off of body language and speech patterns. There’s usually a pretty clear energy level being broadcast.
My guess would be:
you sometimes choose an outfit to match your intended energy level for the day
that outfit mostly acts as a self-signal, reminding you of your intended energy level for the day, so you act more in accord with that intended energy level
your friends then notice your energy level from all the clear nonverbal cues being sent, most of which is not the clothes themselves.
In particular, one prediction this model makes is that if you dress low-energy but feel/act high energy, your friends will mostly pick up high energy vibes rather than low energy vibes. They might not even notice the clothes mismatching the vibes.
Curious to hear how well that does/doesn’t feel like it fits your experiences.
I disagree with this model in multiple ways. I don’t currently have a short summary of that disagreement, so I’ll hit a bunch of points which might gesture in the right direction:
I expect that even people who are relatively good at picking up non-verbal communication will either get very few bits on how they are perceived (e.g. just general positive/negative valence and strength), or (more often) hallucinate a perception which is not there. The thing you’d want to get a read on is, like, what story/role/narrative the clothing is perceived as conveying, and that’s a relatively hard thing to get from a nonverbal read.
I don’t imagine feedback from other people being the main tool anyway. Like, the core way I imagine someone not falling into the neckbeard trap is by looking in the mirror and honestly asking themselves “does that person in the mirror actually give the vibe I’m looking for?”. The hard part is to pay attention to one’s gut and give an honest answer (and different people will be differently biased in that regard).
I guess feedback from others could substitute for the “look in the mirror”, especially if one does not trust oneself. But that substitutes trusting the feedback from others, which is itself tricky. Either one needs nonverbal reads on relatively detailed things like perceived story/role/narrative, or one needs to ask for verbal feedback in a way which both elicits the relevant information (which may be hard to articulate at all) and elicits honest answers.
Insofar as one does rely on feedback from others as a main driver of fashion choices… man, that feels like a trap. Someone who iterates on that feedback is going to shoot themselves in the foot, by e.g. doing things which offend nobody and therefore just look generic, or by doing things which seem kinda vaguely nice but don’t send a coherent message at all, or ???.
When I imagine someone who “understands the relevant things but hasn’t been brave enough to use it”, a central example would be someone who can look in the mirror and accurately assess whether they’ve got the vibe they want, but has mostly optimized their wardrobe based on valence-feedback from other people, without a coherent story/role/narrative. I want to tell that person “pick a strong archetype, make the person in the mirror vibe that archetype, be honest when assessing yourself, then be brave and go rock it”.
Agree that this is the relevant experiment. I have unusually low body-language signalling intensity, so friends consistently could not read my vibe when I didn’t use fashion as a channel for nonverbal communication, but the self-signalling channel is hard to rule out explicitly. Not sure if the difference matters but I agree that the mechanism can be less straightforward here.
Regarding the rest, I agree that we have hit the main disagreement! (And it is difficult to articulate). I think it’s something to do with whether people who dress badly can tell why, or even that, they’re dressing badly. Your bullet points are all points of disagreement, most in straightforward ways, so I’ll only give voice to the interesting ones:
I think the neckbeard really truly believes that their outfit is vibe-appropriate. Perhaps more straightforwardly, the neckbeard agrees 100% with everything you’ve written thus far. When they notice negative reactions they tell themselves “well you can’t please everyone, and some people are bothered by anyone who stands out.” They put on an ironic graphic tee and a visor and a fedora and hold their katana and look in the mirror and think “fuck yeah I’m the coolest person ever, everyone wants to be like me.” (This is a fine thing to believe incidentally! I don’t have that much animosity for the neckbeard. But I think they end up confused and upset by the fact that people avoid them, and a better understanding of fashion could help.) What the neckbeard lacks is taste.
I think most people get lots of bits of information from incidental interaction. The way someone looks at you as you pass has very little informational content, but the difference between how you expect a first conversation to go and how it actually goes has a ton, and the average person can have lots of these if they wish. I don’t absorb these bits easily—I have some embodied cognition/theory of mind deviation that restricts me to just getting valence, which is why I had to do the exercise I recommended (or something like it, my way was less structured) to develop a fashion sense that I’m happy with. But in discussing fashion with others I’ve come to suspect that, like with body language, the things I discovered only by thinking very carefully are actually obvious to most people upon reflection.
Maybe a concrete deviation: It seems like you see fashion largely through the lens of offensive vs. nonoffensive? At least this seems to be the main failure mode you describe, when talking about how an outfit can fail. I do not think this is a useful frame—in my aesthetic language I call this quality “noise” (are we talking about the same quality?), the tendency of an outfit to attract attention and invite judgment of any valence, and it’s only the fourth or fifth thing that I care about when putting an outfit together. Is it your intuition that people fail to be fashionable by failing to be appropriately noisy? This would explain why bravery is the main requisite virtue to you while being nearly irrelevant to me.
I buy that, but I think the cause is more like a motivated blindspot than lack of taste.
Let’s look at the classic meme:
This guy’s problem is not combining an ironic graphic tee with a visor and a fedora and a katana. The guy’s outfit is not the main problem. The guy’s taste is not the main problem. The problem is he weighs like 300 pounds. What he needs is Ozempic.
Now, what does that guy think when he looks in the mirror?
When that guy looks in the mirror, I think he’s telling himself that the outfit looks great, and he’s motivatedly-not-thinking about how overweight he is. He’s telling himself that the outfit puts him in the same bucket as a better-looking guy wearing that same outfit and facial hair.
That’s not a problem of lack of taste, that’s a problem of lack of self-honesty. He needs to be honest with himself about what he sees in the mirror.
I wouldn’t say that’s the main lens I use in my head, but that is an accurate description of a major failure mode, plausibly the most common failure mode.
(Aside: I’d prefer the term “loud” over “noisy”, because “noisy” is easily confused with noise in the sense of signal vs noise, and signal vs noise is a very central concept here.)
I don’t think the meme is representative here though—the guy in the meme is fat because the internet hates this kind of person and also hates fat people. Memes that negatively portray their subject portray the subject as fat. To me the archetypal neckbeard looks like this:
https://preview.redd.it/bf2cd8wm46t01.jpg?width=320&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=f11661e0c9dac5237c0bb43b6ab8e72c324d1e3f
This guy isn’t overweight, isn’t unattractive. He’s confident in his outfit, he’s smug, he’s trimming his facial hair just fine. He just thinks his outfit seems suave and intelligent, but it actually seems childish, patronizing, and incompetent.
And while weight is a relevant part of appearance, it can be separate from fashion. I think Jackie Gleason is the classic example:
https://vintagepaparazzi.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/news_2522.jpg
Not every outfit or silhouette would work on Gleason here even if scaled up, he certainly couldn’t pull off aggressively-uncool counterculture looks, but he manages to dress well (at least in my view) and isn’t just adhering to the dominant archetype. (Orson Welles was also fat and stylish)
Maybe put another way: under your model, can the guy in the neckbeard meme dress well? If not, it seems like you have a model of attractiveness, but not of fashion. If so, it seems like “pick an archetype and embody it confidently, bonus points for noncomformity” is not a good enough description of your model, and I wonder (1) what other components your theory has and (2) what relative weight you attach to those components.
Those are useful examples, thanks. I’m gonna come at this from a different angle, but first to answer this question:
Unsure, either “no” or “it would be hard enough that I have no idea how he’d do it”. I do not think that makes this a model of attractiveness per se, rather I think every outfit has some level of attractiveness required to pull it off (which, for the worst outfits, may be beyond the attractiveness of any actual human). As the relevant section of the post said, attractiveness and charisma are necessary conditions.
Now back to the main cruxy part.
Suppose the neckbeard you linked to looks in the mirror and, in complete self-honesty, gets the vibe that he looks awesome. Like, he imagines someone else who looks just like that, and his gut response is “that guy looks awesome”. Well, as long as he’s being honest with himself… his own reaction is in fact extremely strong evidence that lots of other people would agree that he looks awesome. It’s very unlikely that he is so unique in his tastes (or lack thereof) that nobody else shares them. There may be lots of people who hate it, but at that point it is plausibly just correct to respond “well you can’t please everyone, and anyone who stands out is gonna bother some people”.
Personally, at this point I would tell him that he’s farther than he thinks from the best he could be doing, but yes there are probably many people who will in fact get a pretty good vibe from that outfit (again, assuming the premise that his own honest read was that it looks awesome). So at that point it’s down to numbers: just how many people would think it looks awesome, and how many would be driven away? In that guy’s case, I’d guess the “awesome” camp would be in the minority, but not so rare that it would never make sense to take the tradeoff (“better to be loved by a few and hated by many, than for everyone to feel nothing” as the saying goes).
This is importantly different from the fat guy in the meme! For that guy, the number of people who think he looks awesome is going to be very close to zero, and probably even in his own head he needs to motivatedly-ignore some things about the guy in the mirror in order to think he looks good.
Main point of all that: insofar as one is honest with oneself, one’s own reaction/vibe to a mirror is damn strong evidence of other peoples’ reaction/vibe. Probably at least a large minority will feel the same reaction/vibe, even if one lacks the majority’s taste.
And for most people, whatever reaction/vibe they get will basically match the reaction/vibe most other people would get; by definition most people are in the majority. If most people have the relevant taste, then most peoples’ honest vibe from the mirror will reflect that, and in that case the neckbeard is in the minority. If most people don’t have the relevant taste, then most peoples’ honest vibe from the mirror will reflect that, and in that case it’s fashion twitter which would be in the minority.
I think this is our empirical disagreement, so I’m not sure if conversation beyond this point is productive, but I’m glad we’ve pinpointed it. Concretely, I think this:
is simply false, and is especially false for the sort of people who need fashion advice. There are some relevant nitpicks here, mainly that if reactions to an outfit are more than one-dimensional we shouldn’t expect a “majority” vibe to exist at all, but those only seem important because I think people are often very mistaken about how others receive us.
Beyond that there’s a mindset here that I think you should be wary of, or at least should emphasize more strongly so that others are wary of it:
This is plausibly correct, sure, but I don’t think it feels more correct in cases where it’s true compared to cases where it’s false. Naively chalking up another person’s negative impression of oneself to them being bothered by anybody who stands out is in my view the dominant failure mode for personality, it’s the thought-terminating cliche that stops disagreeable or reactively non-conformist people from performing useful introspection.
Earlier we talked about the information content of a person’s impression of one’s outfit. I expect that very few people can get enough bits out of people who strongly dislike their style to make reasonable judgments about why they bother some people. Thus the strength with which this response resonates is controlled more by one’s prior, which is controlled by these personality factors. Some people may need to hear this, sure, but I’d usually accompany it with “On the other hand, the most stylish people I know very rarely get strong negative reactions, draw a lot of positive attention, and are not optimizing for perceived status or polarization.”
This second point seems more like a values difference than an object-level disagreement, though. If the goal is to optimize for the number of people who see you as (ingroup-proximate + high-status) your advice becomes makes a little more sense, and I’d recommend approaching things differently but broadly adopting the more polarizing, counter-signalling approach (although this means you don’t get to choose the ingroup you’re proximate to! It’s just going to be Todd Phillips fans and co.) I just don’t think this is a worthwhile or efficient thing to optimize for in this medium, and I expect whatever you can accomplish in this way to not be worth the downsides.