Everyone who’s ever put a flattering little black dress on knows clothes can evoke feelings. On the science side, authors Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky in an infamous 2013 article explored what they called enclothed cognition, or otherwise “the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes”. In fact, enclothed cognition illustrates how clothes impact human cognition and subsequently create behavioural patterns, based on both the attire’s symbolic meaning and the wearer’s physicality. In their work, Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky exhibited the phenomenon with an experiment in 2013. Using white lab coats they hypothesized that any type of worn attire fuels a series of mental abstract concepts via its symbolic meaning. It’s through those concepts that the wearer’s emotions are instantly activated as a relation to the process of wearing a specific item such as a white lab coat or a black dress.
If we can become what we wear, then why not try and trigger certain emotions through clothing in order to become more motivated, more focused, or happier? Physical clothing can trigger us to build traits and alter our perception of the self.
Here, a question arises; can virtual clothes evoke the same feelings, therefore, altering our emotional states? While virtual fashion has become the next big thing when it comes to the fashion industry, it’s still a fabulous terra incognita when it comes to scientific research.
So what are the rules in the virtual world? In a decentralised existence, our physical state is just one facet of our identity amongst many. Our avatar can be everything we can imagine to be, equally weighted but substantially different from the physical world. Fashion in the metaverse transcends physicality with its immense potential evoking emotions in a potentially fundamentally different way. Gone is the actual physical sense of the outfit’s weight, softness, or pattern interaction with space. And yet virtual fashion pioneers will tell you a digital dress is no less ‘real’, it elicits emotions in the wearer’s psyche through the unique connection their avatar has to their IRL identity.
And avatars aren’t less real, at least to our psyche. Through them, we experience a new way of dress-up that equips us with the autonomy to be exactly as we want, to experiment in total sartorial freedom. Research from the University of Alberta examined the relationship between avatars in virtual environments and the people they represent and suggested that: “people (balancing the motives of self-verification and self-enhancement) design their avatars to be similar to their real selves, but with some enhancements that are more attractive. In particular, users must enhance on physical attributes they perceive to be weak in real life.” Most importantly they also find that avatar attractiveness affects online behavioural traits such as extraversion and loudness.
Another research from Trinity College Dublin quoted at Forbes, confirmed what we already knew from experience: our avatars are often a crucial way of self-representation that allows us to be creative in how we present ourselves in the virtual world.“Any experimenting is dictated by the limits of technology, an app, the involved community, or the user themselves. However, it still represents a way to feel better or safer in digital worlds that now replace more and more physical-world activities,” researchers conclude. In short, we “redesign” ourselves in the digital world based on how we feel or how we would like to feel. And fashion, albeit virtual, can play a liberating role.