Two considerations (of many) in choosing an outfit to impress:
How good/impressive your audience think it looks, aesthetically.
How good/impressive your audience will expect others think it looks.
Not a fashion expert, but I expect magazines like Vogue serve a social purpose in helping shape #2, just as much if not more than they shape #1 directly.
I claim without citeable evidence that #2 is much easier to affect by actually looking good according to #1 than it is by weird countersignaling games.
edit: 10 minutes later, not having discussed it further with anyone, I’m much less sure this isn’t a spurious claim. comment retracted.
You forgot the seemingly platitudinous but actually important one: how it makes you feel.
I’m not kidding. Something that makes you feel exposed or overcompensating can and will affect your posture, your body language, which will attenuate the “impress” factor of your choice of outfit on the audience. This extends beyond wrong sizing, or fabric: I’m talking about the effect of self-consciousness about an outfit (which is a high probability if you’re going outside of your comfort zone, and wearing something “to impress”) affects your physicality.
But also, what do you mean by “impress”? I assume you mean a certain degree of ostentation? Does “dress to impress” always imply a relative “overdressing” for the occasion, i.e. more formal but ostentatious relative to the baseline of how everyone else in the setting will be dressing?
Two considerations (of many) in choosing an outfit to impress:
How good/impressive your audience think it looks, aesthetically.
How good/impressive your audience will expect others think it looks.
Not a fashion expert, but I expect magazines like Vogue serve a social purpose in helping shape #2, just as much if not more than they shape #1 directly.
I claim without citeable evidence that #2 is much easier to affect by actually looking good according to #1 than it is by weird countersignaling games.
edit: 10 minutes later, not having discussed it further with anyone, I’m much less sure this isn’t a spurious claim. comment retracted.
You forgot the seemingly platitudinous but actually important one: how it makes you feel.
I’m not kidding. Something that makes you feel exposed or overcompensating can and will affect your posture, your body language, which will attenuate the “impress” factor of your choice of outfit on the audience. This extends beyond wrong sizing, or fabric: I’m talking about the effect of self-consciousness about an outfit (which is a high probability if you’re going outside of your comfort zone, and wearing something “to impress”) affects your physicality.
But also, what do you mean by “impress”? I assume you mean a certain degree of ostentation? Does “dress to impress” always imply a relative “overdressing” for the occasion, i.e. more formal but ostentatious relative to the baseline of how everyone else in the setting will be dressing?