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My 2026 resolution is simple: to be The Audacity. What that means in practice is more complicated. In fact I don’t entirely know what it means but I’m excited to find out and I know that it starts with the clothing I choose to put on my body day in and day out.
I’ve spent years thinking about dress academically. Parts of my research looks at ancient Greek material culture, embodied wearing, and the sensory experience of clothing in religious contexts: how people in the ancient world experienced the divine through textile and ornament touching their bodies. I’ve read the phenomenology; I know Merleau-Ponty’s work on the body schema (1962). I can explain Entwistle’s theory of the ‘fashioned body’ as the intersection of individual practice and social structure (2000). I’ve traced how dress functions as a fundamental ‘technology’ of selfhood; a material practice through which we construct, regulate, and communicate identity. And yet. When I open my wardrobe I find a collection of functional garments that fit a person I’m not sure I ever was. Many of them are way too big now. Many were purchased for versions of my life that no longer exist. Almost none of them feel like me. In 2026 I want to fix that. And to keep myself accountable and to consider some of the more research-y aspects of this (and, let’s be real, the Autistic Urge to overshare) I’m documenting the process. The Problem with ‘Just Clothes’ There’s a persistent cultural script that treats caring about what you wear as frivolous; especially for women, especially for academics. The assumption runs something like this: serious people don’t think about clothes; clothes are superficial; caring about appearance is a capitulation to shallow concerns that distract from what really matters. Mark Zuckerberg thinks he can only do good work if he doesn’t have to think about what he is going to wear, and that tells you everything. Also, the research says otherwise. In 2012, Adam and Galinsky published a study that would help establish a new field. They found that wearing a white coat described as a ‘doctor’s coat’ improved performance on attention-based tasks compared to wearing the same coat described as a ‘painter’s coat’, or to simply seeing the doctor’s coat without wearing it (Adam & Galinsky, 2012). They called this phenomenon ‘enclothed cognition’: the systematic influence of clothes on the wearer’s psychological processes through both symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing. Since then, the research has expanded considerably. Studies have demonstrated that what we wear affects confidence and self-perception (Slepian et al., 2015), cognitive processing style (Slepian et al., 2015), social signalling and how others perceive and treat us (Oh et al., 2020), embodied experience and sensory regulation, and emotional states, what has been popularly termed ‘dopamine dressing’ (Schauss, 1979; Küller et al., 2009; Jonauskaite et al., 2020). Dress, it turns out, is not superficial at all. It is a technology we use to think, to feel, to regulate our bodies and our emotions, to communicate who we are and who we want to become. The Body That Wears I am Autistic. This is relevant to any serious discussion of my relationship with clothing, though it is only one factor among several. Autistic people often have complex relationships with sensory input, including the tactile sensations of fabric against skin. For me, some textures are intolerable; others are profoundly regulating. The wrong waistband can ruin my capacity to concentrate. The right fabric can feel like safety. This isn’t unusual. Research on Autism and sensory processing suggests that differences in sensory integration significantly affect daily functioning, and clothing choices represent one domain where Autistic individuals often develop sophisticated self-regulatory strategies (Crane et al., 2009). What the broader enclothed cognition research describes as affecting ‘everyone’ may affect Autistic people more intensely, more consciously, and with higher stakes. But my relationship with dress is also shaped by factors that have nothing to do with my Autism: by gender and how I’ve been taught to perform it, by class and the semiotics of ‘appropriate’ academic presentation, by body size and the messages I’ve internalised about what bodies like mine deserve to wear (and, of course, the dramatic change in my body size, and my history of eating disorders). These threads weave together in ways that are sometimes impossible to separate. I’m not interested in attributing everything to one cause. I’m interested in understanding how all of it works together. Why Handmade? Over the next year, I’m planning to create a wardrobe of approximately 50–70 pieces. Many of these will be handmade garments, either refashioned from items that no longer fit, or newly made, or second hand. I do not intend to purchase any new items. This is ambitious. It will require significant time investment and considerable skill development. I’m an intermediate sewist, and several of the garments I’m envisioning will push me toward advanced techniques. So why handmade? Several reasons. First, making my own clothes allows me to control variables that ready-to-wear simply cannot: fabric, fit, construction, and the sensory experience of wearing. I can choose textiles that work for my body rather than compromising on whatever happens to be available in my size. Second, there’s substantial research suggesting that the process of making affects our relationship with objects. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s classic study (1981) demonstrated that objects we invest labour in become more meaningful; more recent work in material culture studies has explored how craft practices create what Ingold (2013) calls ‘correspondence’ between maker and material. I want my clothes to mean something. Making them myself is one way to ensure they do. Third - and I’ll be honest about this - the ready-to-wear market does not serve me well. While my body is (now) a body most commercial fashion imagines, my taste and what I want to project to the world, is not. My aesthetic preferences run toward colour and pattern in ways the current market often doesn’t accommodate. Making my own clothes is, in part, an act of refusal: a refusal to accept that what exists is all that’s possible. The Year Ahead This project will unfold across four phases (cue the project planning of the academic and Autistic mind…):
Along the way, I’ll be writing about the research that informs my approach: from the psychology of colour to the phenomenology of wearing, from fashion theory to material culture studies. I’ll be documenting my process: the successes, the failures, the seam-ripper moments. And I’ll be thinking aloud about what it means to approach something as personal as getting dressed with the same rigour I’d bring to any other research question. To Be The Audacity I called my resolution to be The Audacity because that’s what this feels like. It feels audacious to care this much about what I wear. It feels audacious to invest this much time in something the world tells me shouldn’t matter. It feels audacious, as an Autistic academic with maximalist tendencies, to insist that I deserve clothes that are beautiful, that fit, that feel good, that look like me. The research tells us that dress matters. That what we wear shapes how we think, how we feel, how we move through the world. If that’s true - and I believe it is - then perhaps it’s not audacious at all to take it seriously. Perhaps it’s just honest. References
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