The rhetoric of self-presentation speaks louder about us, in many cases, than our voices ever can. What we wear and how we wear it is associated with certain assumptions. First impressions are made before we even open our mouths.
In Mimi Spencer’s 101 Things to Do Before You Diet, she discusses this very issue. Getting to know both our personal strengths and weaknesses is helpful so that we can emphasize our strengths and play down our weaknesses. Her book encourages readers to get comfortable with who they are. By accepting ourselves, we can see room for improvement and build upon good character traits so that we grow into the people that we want to be.
The type of clothes and how we wear them can be beneficial or detrimental to our cause, whatever it may be. Following the latest trends might seem like a fashionable move to make, but more often that not, a) the trend doesn’t suit our body type, and b) we feel uncomfortable in trendy clothes and make them look even worse than they already do.
Dressing for the appropriate occasion is important here as well. Showing up in our finest at a coffee shop is unlikely to make us feel at ease, and it will almost certainly draw strange looks from the other patrons who will then be less likely to take us seriously. Similarly, if we throw on a ripped or stained t-shirt before giving a presentation in front of an audience, it will probably have the effect of the audience being appalled, unimpressed, and dissuaded from agreeing with our position.
The key here is to figure out what we feel comfortable and confident with and to work with it. If jeans and a t-shirt are truly the only clothes that you feel comfortable in, you might need to step it up a notch. Examine why you feel uncomfortable wearing anything else, and take it slow—try wearing a slightly more formal shirt, or different pants than jeans, or wear nicer shoes. Even slipping on a couple of accessories—for example, jewelry or a scarf—can be a good bridge between what you’re comfortable and uncomfortable with.
It’s important to get out of our comfort zones because we never know when we will be thrust outside of those zones without warning. It pays to be prepared for any such circumstance. Above all, if we wear what we feel confident in—and if we can try to expand our comfort zone so that we feel confident in a wider variety of outfits suitable to different occasions—it will create a better sense of goodwill between ourselves and the people around us.
The style of dress that we use speaks volumes about who we are. We can breed confidence with the clothes that we wear and the familiarity and comfort of how we wear it. All of this can be used as a rhetorical strategy to convey our personal values and beliefs to others without the necessity of vocalizing it (or as a way to reinforce what we do vocalize). What does your personal style say about you?
I have an ethical issue with rhetoric. Yes, you’re right, these things do work to convey a particular self-image… but is that necessarily a GOOD thing?
Westwood- is it necessarily a BAD thing? I wonder. Rhetoric doesn’t have to have unethical connotations. Rhetoric is, simply, what we do and how we do it and what that then says about us (and it is the study of all of that, as well). Like anything, we CAN misuse it to work to our advantage- but it is also simply the way things are. We assume the appropriate dress to correlate with what we wish to be seen as. And then we become it.