The Psychology of clothing Pt I

For a while now I’ve been curious about exploring the psychological affects clothing and fashion can have on groups of people and or the individual. So today I want to present a question along with some interesting things I read about recently.

So to start this off I thought a good place to start would be Prison wear. After doing some light research I found that the prison uniform came around the 18th and 19th century. The idea was that the external discipline would create Internal discipline. Along with wearing a uniform prisoners were given numbers instead of names. Apparently women’s uniforms did not become a thing until the 1990s. Women were either allowed to wear their own clothing or the uniform’s given had prints and things that were similar to regular civilian clothes. Another interesting thing I read was the jurors are more likely to find a person guilty if they are wearing a prison jumpsuit vs. civilian clothing.

In a more recent study where prisoner discipline and violence was getting worse, they changed uniform rules, allowed female prisoners to wear make-up, and more vibrant color clothing. This dramatically decreased the issues the prison was having. They also found that uniforms may be causing issues with rehabilitation. By stripping inmates of identity they don’t allow people to feel like themselves and have autonomy.

It is a pretty interesting subject to look into and a quick search will give you tons of articles giving more or less the same stories.

So my questions that come from reading about this, and we use this as a baseline for an extreme case.. What are some other places we see uniforms being used? Where is the line between uniform and style genre? Could “trends” be classified as a uniform and if so what kind of social and class issues does that present? How deeply does dress affect our psychology, our identity and our own autonomy in life? I dunno lots of questions and things to think about. This is a topic I quite like thinking about and I think it is a very large one at that. Would love to hear other people’s thoughts and ideas on this one.