FWIW, this is generally true for design things. In web-design people tend to look for extremely simple surface-level rules (like “what is a good font?” and “what are good colors?”) in ways that IMO tends to basically never work. Like, you can end up doing an OK job if you go with a design framework of not looking horrendous, but when you need to make adjustments, or establish a separate brand, there really are no rules at that level of abstraction.
I often get very frustrated responses when people come to me for design feedback and I respond with things like “well, I think this website is communicating that you are a kind of 90s CS professor? Is that what you want?” and then they respond with “I mean… what? I asked you whether this website looks ‘good’, what does this have to do with 90s CS professors? I just want you to give me a straight answer”.
And like, often I can make guesses about what their aims are with a website and try to translate things into a single “good” or “bad” scalar, but it usually just fails because I don’t know what people are going for. IMO the same tends to be true for fashion.
Almost any piece of clothing you can buy will be the right choice in some context, or given some aim! If you are SBF then in order to signal your contrarian genius you maybe want to wear mildly ill-fitting tees with your company logo to your formal dinners. Signaling is complicated and messy and it’s very hard to give hard and fast rules.
In many cases the things people tend to ask here often feel to me about as confused as people saying “can you tell me how to say good things in conversations? Like, can someone just write down at a nuts-and-bolts level what makes for being good at talking to people?”. Like, yes, of course there are skills related to conversations, but it centrally depends on what you are hoping to communicate in your conversations!
I still think there’s a science to it which is yet to be properly written up. It’s not at the level of “this combination of design choices/clothing elements is bad, this one is good”, but there is a high-level organization to the related skills/principles, which can be taught to speed up someone learning design/fashion. They would still need to do a bunch of case studies/bottom-up learning afterwards (to learn specific extant patterns like “the vibe of a 90s CS professor”), but you can make that learning more sample-efficient.
Social skills are a good parallel. Actually talking to people and trying to accomplish different things with your conversations is necessary for developing social competence, but knowing some basics of the theory of mind and social dynamics is incredibly helpful for knowing what to pay attention to and try.
I often get very frustrated responses when people come to me for design feedback and I respond with things like “well, I think this website is communicating that you are a kind of 90s CS professor? Is that what you want?”
I know you (literally and explicitly, in similar words) say it, but this is also true of fashion and fashion advice; you are choosing what message to convey, not whether to convey one.
In the post it says:
Of course, there are lots of other options besides literally just a leather jacket. As a general rule, any outfit which makes people ask “are you in a band?” signals coolness. Personally, I usually wear all black, including suit pants and jacket from a tailor in Shanghai, Converse sneakers, a black hat, and sunglasses.
I have nothing against John and am not commenting on John. However, there were multiple kids at my highschool who thought they would dress like they were in a band and then they’d be cool. We thought these kids were losers, because they acted like aliens with self-esteem issues looking for hacks that would make them cool.
A different way to think about fashion is to ask “What do I want people to think of me?” and “Who do I think of that way, and how do they dress?”. If you want to look cool, you should be thinking of people who are cool and how they pick their clothes, not wearing sunglasses at night[1].
Just like how websites can choose to look like Facebook or like Youtube or a ’90s computer science professor, in fashion there are a thousand ways to look cool and you need to select the appropriate style. Don’t dress up in a snazzy suit to volunteer washing oil off of ducks, don’t wear your leather jacket to a wedding, and maybe throw some faux-minimalism on your website if you’re trying to make it look trendy.
You have to find your niche though! The explicit moral of this comment is have an intended message.
Personally, I would always recommend dressing in high quality clothing[2] that is conspicuously not trendy (not bad looking, just not stuff that signals having just been bought) and that fits you well. This would be really bad advice for some subcultures!
Note: “coolness”, specifically, in fashion often comes from violating some rule, which means anyone wearing Standard Cool Garb looks more like a James Dean wannabe than anything else
Don’t complain about it being expensive just yet: if you’re in the US, somewhere a mile away from you, a resale store is hanging up clothes amounting to hundreds of dollars in sticker price and charging dozens of dollars for it.
FWIW, this is generally true for design things. In web-design people tend to look for extremely simple surface-level rules (like “what is a good font?” and “what are good colors?”) in ways that IMO tends to basically never work. Like, you can end up doing an OK job if you go with a design framework of not looking horrendous, but when you need to make adjustments, or establish a separate brand, there really are no rules at that level of abstraction.
I often get very frustrated responses when people come to me for design feedback and I respond with things like “well, I think this website is communicating that you are a kind of 90s CS professor? Is that what you want?” and then they respond with “I mean… what? I asked you whether this website looks ‘good’, what does this have to do with 90s CS professors? I just want you to give me a straight answer”.
And like, often I can make guesses about what their aims are with a website and try to translate things into a single “good” or “bad” scalar, but it usually just fails because I don’t know what people are going for. IMO the same tends to be true for fashion.
Almost any piece of clothing you can buy will be the right choice in some context, or given some aim! If you are SBF then in order to signal your contrarian genius you maybe want to wear mildly ill-fitting tees with your company logo to your formal dinners. Signaling is complicated and messy and it’s very hard to give hard and fast rules.
In many cases the things people tend to ask here often feel to me about as confused as people saying “can you tell me how to say good things in conversations? Like, can someone just write down at a nuts-and-bolts level what makes for being good at talking to people?”. Like, yes, of course there are skills related to conversations, but it centrally depends on what you are hoping to communicate in your conversations!
I still think there’s a science to it which is yet to be properly written up. It’s not at the level of “this combination of design choices/clothing elements is bad, this one is good”, but there is a high-level organization to the related skills/principles, which can be taught to speed up someone learning design/fashion. They would still need to do a bunch of case studies/bottom-up learning afterwards (to learn specific extant patterns like “the vibe of a 90s CS professor”), but you can make that learning more sample-efficient.
Social skills are a good parallel. Actually talking to people and trying to accomplish different things with your conversations is necessary for developing social competence, but knowing some basics of the theory of mind and social dynamics is incredibly helpful for knowing what to pay attention to and try.
I know you (literally and explicitly, in similar words) say it, but this is also true of fashion and fashion advice; you are choosing what message to convey, not whether to convey one.
In the post it says:
I have nothing against John and am not commenting on John. However, there were multiple kids at my highschool who thought they would dress like they were in a band and then they’d be cool. We thought these kids were losers, because they acted like aliens with self-esteem issues looking for hacks that would make them cool.
A different way to think about fashion is to ask “What do I want people to think of me?” and “Who do I think of that way, and how do they dress?”. If you want to look cool, you should be thinking of people who are cool and how they pick their clothes, not wearing sunglasses at night[1].
Just like how websites can choose to look like Facebook or like Youtube or a ’90s computer science professor, in fashion there are a thousand ways to look cool and you need to select the appropriate style. Don’t dress up in a snazzy suit to volunteer washing oil off of ducks, don’t wear your leather jacket to a wedding, and maybe throw some faux-minimalism on your website if you’re trying to make it look trendy.
You have to find your niche though! The explicit moral of this comment is have an intended message.
Personally, I would always recommend dressing in high quality clothing[2] that is conspicuously not trendy (not bad looking, just not stuff that signals having just been bought) and that fits you well. This would be really bad advice for some subcultures!
Note: “coolness”, specifically, in fashion often comes from violating some rule, which means anyone wearing Standard Cool Garb looks more like a James Dean wannabe than anything else
Don’t complain about it being expensive just yet: if you’re in the US, somewhere a mile away from you, a resale store is hanging up clothes amounting to hundreds of dollars in sticker price and charging dozens of dollars for it.