Dress Down for Success
Most of us have heard it over and over and over again – you need to dress for the job or the position that you want. Silvia Bellezza et al. describe this phenomenon in the June 2014 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research,
In both professional and nonprofessional settings, individuals often make a significant effort to learn and adhere to dress codes, etiquette, and other written and unwritten standards of behavior. Conformity to such rules and social norms is driven by a desire to gain social acceptance and status.
What they don’t tell you is the exception to this rule.
Lawyers are particularly prone to the fallacy of assuming that the appearance of wealth is equated to competence or success. For many lawyers, the estimation of accomplishment in their career are the visible and ostentatious displays of luxury items. The accumulation of these items could only be possible, it is presumed, if this lawyer was particularly good at what they do.
Malcolm Gladwell states in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,
[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.
For obvious reasons this logic is flawed, as there are some practices of law which are inherently more lucrative than others, and compensation is rarely based on the complexity of the law or the legal analysis possessed by the practitioner. As Gladwell states,
…mediocre people find their way into positions of authority…because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.
The assumption of success based on visible signals is also flawed for another reason, which Bellezza et al. call “signals of nonconformity” as expressed by persons of higher status and authority,
Since nonconformity often has a social cost, observers may infer that a nonconforming individual is in a powerful position that allows her to risk the social costs of nonconformity without fear of losing her place in the social hierarchy.
In other words, they dress down because they can, and can even be perceived as more powerful and competent because they do. They can demonstrate this nonconformity in subtle ways, such as a different PowerPoint template, or not adhering to a dress code.
Dine Gerdeman describes these findings in Forbes,
Think Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his hoodie, or the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs in black turtleneck and jeans. To many observers, these chief executives exuded confidence in their dressed-down rejection of the traditional pricey business suit and tie.
It happens in academia, too. Anat Keinan, assistant professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, and Silvia Bellezza, a doctoral candidate at HBS, noticed that at academic conferences, it was often the accomplished professors who dressed on the casual side more than students and other less-published attendees. They also noticed over the years that people tended to dress less formally at academic gatherings as they gained more status.
Conformity can even diminish the authority of the individual as the explicit use of conspicuous consumption is often associated with what is considered “low-status groups,” often referred to in popular culture as the nouveau-riche effect.
The authors even point to a “poorgeoisie” trend by wealthy consumers who embrace nonconformity by “dressing like hoboes but spending like millionaires.” You might even say that they are becoming “hipsters” to the wealthy, except even the hipsters are now shunning the hipster label.
The advantage to the rest of us meagre lawyers is we can now ignore all those career coaches and counselors and wear whatever the heck we want to. Just tell them you meant to do it.
Ridiculous—this may be true for tech, but not for law. In this industry, non-conformity (à la senior partner swag) means having balls enough to strut around with funky glasses, crazy bow ties, and silly socks. Rarely, if ever, does it manifest in the form of dressing down to match outfits with your teenage son.
Guest,
As mentioned, nonconformity can be expressed in very subtle forms. In hyper-conservative big firm cultures this does often manifest itself in just a small deviation from the perceived norm, such as a red bow tie at a formal event.
The authors describe this as a creative choice counter conformity through original dress style,
I can think of discrete examples of this playing itself out in the legal field, such as Eugene Meehan, known for wearing distinctive clothing and kilts at law events, and Robert Shawyer, known for his bright red dress shoes.
I think the topic of discussion is interesting, though I find the study itself to sort of miss the point. It cherry picks the rather obvious points without actually trying to find the boundaries of the various hypotheses. Among them, the observer actually making the inferences must be ‘familiar’ with the environment, it must be in a ‘prestigious’ context, and it must be perceived as ‘intentional’ by the actor. The inferences—of status and competence— are largely bundled together as if to be mostly co-extensive, and are together mediated by the observers’ attributions of the actor’s autonomy.
So to recap: you (actor) are in a prestigious environment familiar to the observer, you intentionally do something that suggests you have autonomy vis-a-vis the other actors in the same environment. As a result you are perceived as having higher status (wealth, hierarchy, etc.) and the ability to successfully pursue specific tasks (competence). I see those nuances as qualifiers to the effect rather than expounding on it.
The Urban Dictionary definition of ‘maverick’ is as follows (grammar and punctuation errors from original): “Someone who refuses to play by the rules. he/she isn’t scared to cross the line of conformity. but their unorthodox tactics get results!” The OED definition is “an unorthodox or independent-minded person”. The point is that we love associate being a maverick with being an innovator and ‘game-changer’.
A maverick can’t exist in isolation because you must have some orthodoxy against which you are unorthodox. To build on this, I know someone that works in IT/computer networking. He’s got long hair and a big long beard. His perception is that these traits give him credibility in the eyes of he clientele because he’s the ‘real deal’, or in other words is perceived to be more competent. So is he nonconforming vis-a-vis regular society or simply conforming vis-a-vis his particular subgroup to which he pro-actively identifies?
With respect to the tech world, I’d say that wearing a suit and tie would be nonconformance. Even as a lawyer. But that’s because it’s a community that generally sees itself as non-comforming to the traditional standards. So a dressed-down lawyer in that world is in many ways just conforming to the new norm, but failure to do so (i.e. wearing a suit and tie) just makes you look like an outsider slavishly conforming to the rejected norm.
So really you must be within or proximate to the sphere of conformance to have subtle nonconformance be of any effect. The private school kid that wears his uniform with swagger doesn’t have much credibility on the ‘other’ side of the tracks.
Some of these people named above, e.g., Steve Jobs wear what they wear or wore because they don’t want to waste time “thinking” about what to wear — that’s usually the case for many highly intelligent people. President Obama is known to keep his outfits simple for the same reason. If anything what’s being deemed as non-conformity coincides at least in these examples with confidence in one’s abilities. Key here is these people don’t waste thoughts. Just a thought.