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.
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.