Today was presentation day. I had to wear a suit.
This prompted absolutely *everyone* I bumped into over the course of the day to rattle off one of the following comments:
“Hey! Why’re you looking so snazzy?”
“Nice threads today!”
“Big presentation / interview today?”
“You look good today!”
“Why are you all dressed up?”
Of course, everyone’s got their own little cutesy way of saying it to make it sound totally original. But it’s not. You’re complimenting your buddy on his suit before you even know the words are coming out of your mouth. I know you’ve done this, too. Probably every time you’ve ever seen a colleague in a suit on their way to class. You don’t even think about making the comment, it just happens. Suit day automatically changes commentary from “what’s up?” to “looking good!”
What’s curious to me is how blatantly apparent it is every single person I talk to is making judgments and assumptions based on my clothing. Moreover, you don’t suddenly notice your buddy is wearing a suit when you started talking to him; you’ve got that figured out as soon as you made eye contact with him all the way down the hall. You could even further conjecture from here that even the people I don’t talk to are judging me based on my clothing. If you’ve read anything by Malcolm Gladwell or have ever taken a Psychology class, this isn’t really anything groundbreaking. It’s just interesting to see such a blatant real life example. Makes me wonder how many people make judgments about me based on whether or not I gel my hair in the morning, or shave the night before.
So here’s experiment #1: How many days in a row would I have to wear my suit before people stop complimenting me on my apparel? How many days until the day I switch back and people start asking “ew, what happened today?”
Even better was when I bumped into a friend on my way to Physics class. It was outdoors, and my winter coat was zipped up to the brim. So she asked “why are you wearing a suit today?” based solely on my pants.
Experiment #2: I’m going to go out one day with just the suit pants on. Under my winter coat, I’ll wear a dirty t-shirt with a giant penis or something drawn on the front in sharpie marker. Someone will comment “Looking good today!”, and I’ll unzip my coat and say “actually, I’m wearing a dirty t-shirt with a penis on the front!” I wonder how people would react to that.
Experiment #3: Why should I have to wait for presentation / interview day for people to give compliments on how I look? Try this one: Tomorrow, compliment any one person on how they look (especially if it’s me!). No reason, other than that they happen to look particularly good today. Let’s start sharing the love.