Last Friday after work, I stopped at the shops to grab some groceries. Before I even entered the centre, two strangers had nodded at me as they walked past. I can’t remember ever seeing them before in my life, I wouldn’t be able to identify them now, but I know why they acknowledged me – we were wearing the same shirt.

The shirt isn’t a sporting team shirt. I work for my family’s business, the name of which isn’t even displayed on my pocket. My work clothes certainly aren’t high-end brands. The shirt I was wearing on Friday is heavy drill cotton, bright orange on the top half, navy blue on the bottom half, with several stripes of silver grey reflective tape cutting me horizontally into eights. (Yes, it’s very attractive). The point is, to those people I was recognisable. Long pants, steel-cap boots, grime marks up to the elbow, and the type of shirt meant they knew enough of me to acknowledge a shared experience, all communicated in a casual nod as we passed each other.

The last time I went to that shopping centre, I was in another ‘uniform’ – navy blue slacks, collared shirt, and my nurse’s watch tapped a beat against my chest as I tried to slip through the crowds before school finished. That time, I was smiled at by pensioners, people using crutches and the check-out chick said “You’re a nurse, aren’t you!” as I stepped up to pay.

It’s peculiar what clothes can do. Aside from helping you avoid that nightmare where you find yourself stark blushing naked in public, clothes have power.

The power of what you wear is sometimes impossible to ignore. What we wear has a power that extends to people who see us. Baggy pants with underwear showing must mean something, though so far I think it means “Help, I need a belt!” I always smile at or salute anyone in an Australian Defence Force uniform as a sign of my support and own time in the Navy. I always wave at firemen because… well, because they’re firemen.  There’s magic in what a bride wears, in a flash of a shirt in a particular blue – a power to raise emotion and memories to waft and dance before our eyes. What we wear often has a message sewn deeply in amongst its fibres, whether we recognise it, deliberately flaunt it to the world, or have a very specific, beloved target in mind.

But clothes have a power that arcs back to the wearer as well. My moods can be influenced by what I wear, and what I wear often changes the way I move, think and feel. Last week I was up to my (newly tinted) eyelashes in study and assignments, but I couldn’t focus. Something just felt….off. I got up, checked the front door. Still something bugged me. The boys were asleep (I checked again), I had my favourite study music on, I was working to a looming collision-course deadline, I couldn’t afford to wander off but there was an itch in my head that something wasn’t right. Want to guess what the problem was?

I wasn’t wearing shoes. Somehow, for some baffling reason, my brain equates bare feet with blue screen of death in my head. No shoes = no concentration. Once I popped my ugg boots on, focus returned and I had no problem completing a lecture and reading notes until midnight. At which time I couldn’t fall straight into bed, but had to put on my pj’s first. I guess it’s just one of my own personal rules about how I dress, when and why.

Everyone I know has their own rules about what – or what not – to wear. No white before Labor Day. Redheads don’t wear pink or red. Rock t-shirts are forever. You can/can’t wear slacks to church. You wear shoes when you go shopping. Eye shadow and handbag colour should match. Then there are the secret powers our clothes give us. The shoes that make us taller/shorter/have gorgeous calves. The shirt that hides the wobble/boosts the boobage/show the biceps. I look/feel professional/intelligent/confident/invisible when I wear that. I feel gorgeous wrapped in this. This is my superhero cape.

And these are my ugg boots. They have a secret super-power. They help me study.

Which superpowers do particular clothes give you? Are there things you “have” to wear to do a certain activity? Is there a “special nod” group you belong to, because of what you wear? What rules do you have about how to dress, what to/not wear?

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