Good news, fellow poors! (Though this weekend I bought a $10 shirt from the early 1970s, so who's laughing now, Wolf of Wall Street?) According to a recent piece in The Guardian, you can arguably be too well dressed.
"To be well dressed, you have to acknowledge that you're dressing for the joy and comfort of others as well as your own," writes Daisy Buchanan. "The clothes you choose to wear will be interpreted by the people you see in them, and the only way to avoid this is to move to one of the remoter bits of the Outer Hebrides and avoid all human contact."
"We're visual creatures," she continues. "And even though our clothes are not permanent parts of us, they're the elements that can make us seem memorable. Perversely, people generally don't like it when others appear to be deliberately drawing attention to themselves, especially with ostantacious displays of wealth. So you might think you're well-dressed in a suit that screams its four-figure price tag, but to angry, envious onlookers, you're so overdressed that you may as well have gone out in a diamond-encrusted shirt and golden crown."
And, well, yes. The point Buchanan goes on to make is that while decking yourself out in trends ala Kanye West may be "fashionable" as per "the fashion industry," it doesn't translate into personal style; that you're not exactly wearing something that reflects you as a person, or your own tastes. If your own tastes are fashion trends, well, forget everything. But for those of us who will never, ever wear neon no matter how hard it's thrust at us, then move on — where what you want. You can read the whole article here, and discuss what you think about this theory below.
Let's do this.
