Psychology of dressing: The lies your outfit tells about you

When I am taking a break between workouts in the gym, I find a spot, sit and observe people. Often, it is to admire people’s results of hours and days, and years in the gym, how their bodies are thanking them by popping them muscles.

Out here, vanity is usually defined by how one dresses, or what they (their face) looks like. In the gym, nobody remembers that the face is part of the vanity trinity because the sweat and the strange expressions from workout strains are constant. You cannot have a dignified face while in the gym.

When I re-joined the gym about a year ago, I was often fascinated by a certain young lady who would rock in full makeup and then take regular breaks to renew it. She stopped doing that. Now she is all about taking photos of her abs and flat tummy, and nobody bats an eyelid for that. That is what the gym does – redefines your vanity values.

I like watching a certain man. If he is tall, he is five feet five inches and has most of his workout mates towering above him. It does not bother him because for strength, he is neck to neck with them. That is not the reason I am fascinated – not since I realised that small people, including women, have inner strength that pops out in the gym.

Farm dress code

It is his dress code. As his peers in the gym wear what we are used to as workout clothes, he wears one of those checked long-sleeved shirts and cotton trousers. Initially, I thought he could not afford gym attire, but then I realised his sneakers alone could buy the whole gym. It is, a choice and if I was not the type to defy norms, I probably would have asked him why.

Then there is my neighbour, a retired office worker who single-handedly works his farm. This man could afford to hire labour if he so chose, but I get the feeling he gets more than to reap what he sows literally. He gets his alone time, he works out, and he kills time. He got the formula to avoid post-retirement depression. It is, however, his farm dress-code that I notice more.

As other farm workers wear their oldest, tattered tee-shirt and trousers that are never cleaned, he turns up in a clean, long-sleeved shirt, cotton trousers, a cow-boy hat and rubber boots. I suspect the only reason he wears his rubber boots is to protect his feet from injury, otherwise I easily imagine him in a pair of leather shoes.

Now, this man raises eyebrows because of that, but he probably figures that the farm is now his office and he might as well turn up in office clothes. Another possibility, he is making use of his collection of official outfits he wore before retirement. The third option is that these clothes, especially the long-sleeved shirts, protect him from the harsh sun better than a tee-shirt ever could. He is a genius.

The two above remind me of someone close to me who always looks so debonair come rain, come sunshine. Often, he is broke, but you can never tell from the way he dresses. His argument is, that when you are smartly dressed, people’s eyes are blinded to anything that might be wrong with you, and no wonder cons tend to be impeccably dressed.

“You dress like a mzungu.” That is an accusation I get a lot. You might mistake that statement for a compliment, but really what they mean is I do not put much thought into how I dress. You will not catch me in any office wear. The more casual my outfit is the happier I am. I dress for comfort, not for people to be impressed, and I suspect it is the same for the gym and the farm guys.

The only problem with how I dress is people often dismiss me, especially when I visit big offices. I learned how to take care of that – I engage my foreign accent mode and voila! Doors open.

Humans, in the end, will over and over again prove how superficial and controllable they are.

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