Proceeding with the Project Three
In project three, I initially investigated my question “How can our clothing trigger communications internally or externally” by inviting my friends to take part in a small experiment. I asked them to randomly create their comparison group for items they liked and disliked in clothing to trigger some interesting events or conversations.
The results were not rewarding enough because changing a single item in outfit was too trivial. However, when reviewing the feedback collecting from friends again recently, I found most of them stated their feelings they grasped in workday scenarios: office, commute, lunch break… Also taking into account of experiences in unit 2, I realized the considerable amount of time people invest in their work, which means young people’s outfits are serving for their working time in many cases.
Simultaneously, I struggled with the problem that how to narrow down my focus at that time and told Jasminka my difficulty. One of the suggestions she gave was to combine another area I was interested with the current topic to test if something new could be generate. It led me to look again at my box of uncertainties, from which I identified mental health as my second consideration.
Driven by the things above, I decided to investigate on the intersection of workplace, clothing, and wellbeing. I was curious how people choose to wear in their workplace.
Workplace, Clothing, and Wellbeing
In my first job, I used to experience a few uncomfortable moments of being judged by senior colleagues on my outfits or heard some unfriendly comments on other people’s clothing in gossip time. However, when I jumped to the second company, the new work environment was more tolerant and embraced various styles of dressing. There were only praises of outfits between colleagues rather than criticism. Such a positive atmosphere eventually made me confident and stayed focused on work itself rather than worried about being criticized in terms of clothing etiquette.
Besides, I have also heard some outfit-related complaints from my friends in their work. For example, a friend working in a state-owned enterprise shared her dissatisfaction that the strict dress code made her have to spend extra money on the clothes she disliked to deal with office scenarios.
In the past ten years, there has been some legal cases dealing with the unreasonable dress code people met in the workplace. For example, a women in the UK who was fired because of her rejection to wear high heels initiated an online petition which attracted 152,420 signatures to appeal to illegality for a company to require women to wear high heels at work (UK Government and Parliament, 2016). And in the thriving social media app “Red Book” in China, a considerable number of Generation Z youngsters are talking about the invisible workplace bully they are suffering from because of their clothing.
To get a more comprehensive understanding, I read the Psychology of Fashion (Mair, 2018), which introduces the world of fashion in relation to human behavior, from how clothing can affect our cognitive processes to the way retail environments manipulate consumer behavior. Among all the information Mair provided, I paid attention to her detailed exposition of enclothed cognition and her demonstration on the relationship between clothing, self, and identity.
Enclothed cognition is defined as the systematic influence that beliefs about clothing have on the wearer’s psychological processes dependent on the co-occurrence of the symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing the clothes. Through experiments with white lab coats, Adam and Galinsky (2012) demonstrated the profound effect clothing can have on people’s cognitions.
For clothing’s relation with self and identity, as is elaborated by Mair, since what we wear is an outward display of our self and our identity, we cannot separate clothing from these two concepts. While we choose to identify with those whom we perceive as like-minded, who look like ourselves, who have a similar level of attractiveness and who dress similarly, we also have the need to feel unique, to differentiate ourselves from others. In workplace, similarly, when people are looking for the conformity among colleagues, they sometimes slightly break established norms to stand out from the group.
In addition, I kept in mind one of reading materials which introduced Google’s Project Aristotle (Duhigg, 2016) in unit 2. At the end of the article, Duhigg concluded that “no one wants to put on a ‘work face’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘psychologically safe’.” In my understanding, If clothing functions as people’s display of self and identity, wearing comfortably in the office will also lead to workers’ psychologically safe condition.
Based on the information above, I tried to draw a mind map to construct the link between workplace, clothing, and wellbeing.
Struggling with the Direction to Focus on
When I attempted to envisage the story to narrative and questioned myself what my target was about the clothing in workplace, I at the first place got stuck. Therefore, I shifted my focus on people’s whole day activities on weekdays.
In the post-Covid world, commutes gradually come back as our routine on weekdays. As is raised by Bailey and Cohen (2021), commutes help us separate our home and work identities, set healthy boundaries between them, and avoid burnout. However, Chatterjee et al. (2020) pointed out that the subjective experience of transport, including how it contributes to overall happiness, warrants policy action and research through their evidence review. These opinions directed me to the possibility of investigating on people’s decisions and troubles encountered on weekday outfits considering their quality of commutes.
People generally invest their time at home, in workplace and in commuting on weekdays. However, there might be more occasions when we tend to conduct extra activities to improve ourselves or just for relaxation, but we currently have limitations in satisfying ourselves with the most suitable clothing facing different scenarios.
Based on such an analysis, I tended to collect voices from workers about weekday clothing and activities. However, when I shared my thoughts on Monday tutorial session on April 8th, I found there was still an ambiguity in clarifying my way of narration and how it served to my stakeholders. After the discussion among the group, I reorganized all the ideas I have developed and found my real concern was still about people’s constraints of real self in workplace rather than providing convenience for people to make transitions between work and life.
How Office Dress Code Constrains People’s Real “Self”
As a result, I took a step back to the workplace scenario and to focus on the intersection of clothing, workplace, and wellbeing, which I think appropriate to be categorized as public discourse.
Through conducting interviews with young workers and research on the industry and workplace they are in, my aim is to investigate on stories about young workers’ conformity to dress code, to understand their situation and help voice it out.
Reference List
Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (4), pp. 918– 925.
Bailey, J. R. and Cohen, A. (2021), That “Dreaded” Commute Is Actually Good for Your Health. Available at: https://hbr.org/2021/05/that-dreaded-commute-is-actually-good-for-your-health (Accessed: 6 April 2024).
Chatterjee, K. et al. (2020) ‘Commuting and wellbeing: a critical overview of the literature with implications for policy and future research’, Transport Reviews, 40(1), pp. 5–34. doi: 10.1080/01441647.2019.1649317.
Duhigg, C. (2016) What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html (Accessed: 6 April 2024).
Mair, C. (2018) The Psychology of Fashion, London: Routledge.
UK Government and Parliament. (2016) Make it illegal for a company to require women to wear high heels at work. Available at: https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/129823 (Accessed: 14 April 2024)