Dr. Carolyn Lee reflects on a different cliché each week. Recently, in her blog, “Silence is Golden,” she makes a case for quiet. This week Carolyn explores the cliché, clothes make the man.
Learn more about Dr. Carolyn Lee on her biography page or investigate 29 more clichés in her latest book, Keep Your Eye on the Ball And Other Clichès to Live by.
Clothes Make the Man
Some years ago, I had dinner with a couple I didn’t know very well. The guy was a very successful entrepreneur who had retired after selling a number of companies he had started. I was interested in his story, and I asked him to tell me how he had begun, how he had made some of the initial steps that ultimately led to his standing in the corporate world. He chose to tell me an incident about shoes.
He was a young man attempting to build a career and learn from people who had achieved the kinds of goals he had set for himself. He had wangled an interview with the powerful CEO of a business located in downtown Manhattan, and the day before the interview he was walking along Fifth Avenue, nervously rehearsing his lines. He suddenly found himself in front of a store featuring Ferragamo Footwear. There in the window was a pair of leather loafers, the most beautiful shoes he had ever seen. They were $400. The last time he had splurged on a pair of shoes, he bought Florsheim plain toe Oxfords for $49.99. He had no business even thinking about Ferragamos, but it wouldn’t hurt just to try them on. Right? What happened next was a little like Cinderella’s sliding her foot into the glass slipper. He wrote a check for those loafers, thereby practically draining his bank account. But all these years later, he credits those shoes with giving him the confidence to sail through that interview and secure the position that began his successful career.
Clothes may not make the man, but clothes can certainly make a difference. Two young men came to me when I was teaching an acting class and announced that they’d like to do a scene from Inherit the Wind. This play tells the story of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” in which two nationally known attorneys, Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady, face off over the issue of teaching evolution in a high school science class. On the day the scene was to go before the class, the boy playing Drummond showed up in a pair of cut-off denim shorts. I almost refused to let them do the scene, but I allowed it to go on, and it was awful. The Drummond boy never got into character, and the audience couldn’t take him seriously. I told the boys they could do the scene again later in the week, but I wanted Drummond to come in a three-piece suit. Yes, he needed a vest, and, if he could find one, a pocket watch would be a nice accessory. A few days later, he showed up in a three-piece suit, and from the pocket was dangling a watch on a gold chain. Now, I cannot say that the scene then was brilliant, and this guy suddenly became a great actor, but I can say that he played with noticeably more confidence, and the audience got a much better idea about who Henry Drummond was.
The subject of clothing always comes up in any discussion about nonverbal communication. And people have some strong opinions about it. I always made it clear to students or seminar participants that I wasn’t telling them how to dress; I was just telling them people would notice how they dressed and would assign meaning to it. It’s certainly okay with me if people want to wear jeans with large, fashionable holes in them, but they need to recognize that jeans with large fashionable holes in them say something to the observer. To some they might say, “Wow. You are really with it, trendy and stylish.” To others they might say, “You fell for that craze?” Guys can wear their pants down below their bottoms if they want to, but people will notice and have opinions about that sartorial choice. To some people: cool cat. To others: hoodlum.
I’ve had students resist this whole notion. They say, “I am who I am, and I don’t care what people think about what I wear.” That’s okay, too, as long as one can be comfortable with the responses one might get to distinctive style choices. For some people, getting a response is the point. If a person wishes to be seen as a nonconformist, there are certainly clothes that say “noncomformity.” If someone wishes to come off as paragon of high style, that’s altogether possible. Even if a person wants to say, “I don’t care about clothes,” there are clothes that dramatically convey that message.
The idea that clothes are an important element in our attempts to communicate who we are is nothing new. In the first act of Hamlet, as Laertes is about to set out for Paris, his father, Polonius advises him to buy costly, but not gaudy clothes for the trip. Why? “For the apparel oft proclaims the man.”
Yes, apparel matters. It is one of the useful tools we have to express our identities. And without it, well . . . I don’t even want to think about that. There was no subject about which Mark Twain didn’t have something interesting and amusing to say. Concerning the subject of clothing, he made this inarguable observation: “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
Want to Read More?
Check out Dr. Carolyn Lee’s blogs on her website, she features a new cliché each week or you can order her new book, Keep Your Eye on the Ball And Other Clichès to Live By. Want to know more about the woman behind the words? Read more about Carolyn here. We hope you enjoyed this article learning more about the cliché, clothes make the man.
