Wearing flashy/status clothes makes people less likely to cooperate with you

A long time ago in one of the first properties I rented the washing machine stopped working. My flatmate called the agency and a day later, I think it was a Saturday morning, a rough looking man turned up to repair it. I remember he had a tattered pair of working jeans and a similarly tattered polo shirt on. He pulled the machine out, took it apart diagnosed the issue and popped out to his car get a part. While he was gone my flatmate clued me in to the fact that was the owner of the property, who also owned the agency, and in turn owned a awe-ful lot of property in the local area. The guy had popped out to his brand new land rover to dig out a part from the back. I was completely blown away at how humble and down to earth he was.<p>Years later I worked with a guy, a multi-millionaire, the guy lives in one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in London. Again dressed in a normal pair of jeans and t-shirt, nothing too noteworthy. I remember him telling me how dry and boring his neighbours are, too concerned with &#x27;things&#x27;. When he wants to go for a pint rather than go to his local, he heads to the less well off area a few streets over to the pub there and enjoys the company of normal people.<p>From these and other experiences I&#x27;ve come to think that the more you look, and act, like you&#x27;ve &#x27;got money&#x27; the less you actually have.

Now redo the study, but IRL and with actual status clothes == high quality materials, perfect fit, nice flashy style (that means zero logos!).<p>I made this experiment: I have few really cheap suits (looking OK but that&#x27;s it) and few very expensive suits. When I wear the cheap ones, people are normal with me. When I wear the expensive ones, people wearing normal clothes don&#x27;t notice and people &quot;in the know&quot; (wearing expensive suits themselves) will start commenting on the quality of my materials, ask me about my tailor, etc - it&#x27;s very obvious that it places me in their &quot;friend&quot; category immediately.<p>Having luxury brand logo on me would get me laughed out of that room - nobody has anything against cheap clothes but expensive clothes with logos are ridiculous to every actually rich person, it&#x27;s like that meme with an adult trying to be cool among teenagers - and it makes total sense that other people don&#x27;t like someone trying to level themselves above them by fakery, that&#x27;s just like driving a fifth-hand Mercedes-Benz S-Klasse from 2010 and talking about the price it had when it was manufactured all the time (and complaining about gas prices in the same sentence).

I was having this talk the other day: I hate &quot;high end&quot; logo clothes and don&#x27;t want to compete with people that showcase their logo clothes.<p>The average clothing store is decent enough for me. I would buy clothes with no distinctive marks if I could find them. Just plain material and colors.

I like to wear nice clothes at work. I feel good in them and it is my way of being respectful to the workplace.<p>I probably carry this too far when traveling. I have very light weight traveling sport coats and slacks - all washable in a hotel room and lots of hidden pockets (TravelSmith is a favorite brand). Sometimes it pays off big: when my wife and I were traveling around Central America with a buddy of mine and his wife, my friend just packed tshirts, shorts, and sandals. Every time we walked into a restaurant to eat, his wife complemented me on looking so nice. This bugged my friend, and if we can’t irritate our friends, then what is the joy in life :-) Seriously though, it just feels respectful to be nicely dressed when entering restaurants and people’s homes when traveling.

The article&#x27;s title is &quot;Showing off your status and wealth makes you seem less co-operative&quot;, and the title here on HN is absolutely wrong.<p>I like wearing flashy clothes myself, and I would even say it has proven advantageous to cooperation in my line of work, so I was curious about this article. However, nowhere is it stated that flashy clothes make people less likely to cooperate with you. They say wearing clothes with luxury logos and signal high status does.

I refuse to wear or display any corporate logo, even if I generally like the company or its products. I buy unbranded clothing. When I can&#x27;t get something unbranded (like a decent parka), I remove or obliterate the logo. I covered the apple on my phone and computer with electrical tape, even though I&#x27;ve been a Mac user for nearly 30 years.<p>I am not a billboard. I reject status and status seeking behavior. I refuse to help corporations with their marketing and promotion. I wouldn&#x27;t even do it if they paid me because I am against advertising. It&#x27;s all manipulative and depraved and it promotes status and class.

Any kind of self-promotion is unpleasant, except to other self-promoters. For them its competitive. And yes, this includes the virtue emojis on Twitter and GitHub.

I constantly wear clothes with logos such as : O&#x27;Reilly, Slackware, Debian, FSF, Postgresql... do you think it makes people less likely to cooperate? :)

Not surprised. The hot style right now is &quot;authenticity&quot; and typical high status clothing is associated with just the opposite of that.

Flashy, but not if it&#x27;s clean and professional. No bling or bright orange sneakers.<p>I worked with a gentleman once. He was a tall, handsome, intelligent manhattanite. Very pleasant to communicate with. He told me a story of how he was wearing some very simple clothing after running in Central Park at lunch - sweat pants and a vest. Someone later mistook him for a delivery boy. And on the opposite end, when he wears a suit, he is treated like a total VIP.<p>Do not underestimate the power of presentation and projection of success.

I think this is why I get along so well with construction workers. As far as my personal presentation goes, I definitely look more like a carpeneter than a sysadmin on any given day.

People wearing flashy&#x2F;status clothes are very cooperative. They are willing to walk around with logo&#x27;s, advertising brands. While a sandwich man gets paid for such a job, the people wearing flashy&#x2F;status clothes pay lots of money to do this kind of work.

a lot of salt in these comments about fashion logo wear, which I mostly agree with, but what about band shirts? I&#x27;m strictly band shirts and have been for like 20 years. if there&#x27;s one thing I&#x27;ll freely advertise its the music that I like, and wearing the right shirt at the right time can bring happiness to and lead to some interesting interactions with peers and strangers alike.<p>gone are the days of casual Friday so dress for success and rep your favorite music today

While I may agree with the study&#x27;s conclusions, the first line struck me as extremely biased and unscientific:<p>&quot;People who can afford luxury goods tend to buy them, and to show them off.&quot;<p>In my experience, that&#x27;s a crap shoot - some do, some don&#x27;t. It also begs the question - what&#x27;s a &quot;luxury good&quot; vs one that lasts longer, has more utility, etc?

What or who defines &quot;status clothes&quot;?<p>Is it the little Lacoste alligator that sets people off? &quot;How dare they spend $100 on a shirt just to piss me off!&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t care much for your plain t-shirt with a fuck all Patagonia logo on the chest, but if I decided to not cooperate with that person, I&#x27;d have been out of a job by now.

And usually inteligence is also inversely proportional. Most inteligent people I meet are quite casual or don&#x27;t care. Also smarter with their money.

I got a bunch of fake Supreme, Gucci and Versace one time cause I thought it was hilarious and I needed some fresh threads after sweating out most of my clothes being at the beach that weekend for the same night. After I got all these compliments from people on my clothes when I returned to North America like wow isn&#x27;t that shirt 200$... Someone STOLE THE FAKE SUPREME SHIRT!!!<p>Like... I got that for 5$ at a bus station in Latin America and all those shirts fell apart within a year anyways.<p>I also remember going to a club wearing that supreme shirt and this other older guy had a fake supreme shit that just said &quot;millennials&quot; in the red bar instead which was great. He just kept on giving me the stink eye. His shirt was admittedly 10x better

The study is based on interactions between strangers on the internet - it doesn&#x27;t necessarily indicate how this would play out in the real world.

I had a phase when I would wear expensive clothes. I thought that this way I would show the world that I am someone. You know an ego boost. But then I realised that almost nobody really cares and those people who care about these things are not the people I would like to be associated with. Then when realise that this expensive piece of clothing is actually cheap and made by near slave workers somewhere in a third world country, you realise that you actually look stupid in those clothes. Since then I only care if the clothing is made of good material and preferably in my own country - but this is not a given - it may say it&#x27;s made in my country, but it could have been made in Asia but without tags.

My fashion tip if you’re a somewhat attractive 18-34 man: look at what unisex styles are fashionable among young women and try to recreate the look from the mens section.<p>You’ll have an outfit that looks sharp, and you can avoid a lot of the “$200 plain shirt with a logo” bullshit.

I would prefer to work with someone wearing Gucci over someone in a black North Face vest any day.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s necessarily a good assumption that people treat self-chosen avatar representations the same way they&#x27;d treat an actual human. It is common for people to use avatars in a type of expression that they wouldn&#x27;t do in real life, and the participants may have been affected by this.<p>i.e. Avatars are free, fungible in quality, and those who choose those symbols they may be signaling an aspiration for these symbols. Rather than signaling an achievement for wealth or an appreciation for luxury, it may be signaling a desperation for wealth. Would the people who can actually afford luxury goods plaster those symbols on their avatars?

As usual with these sorts of articles, should be prefaced with “A single study claims…”

Actual article headline is, &quot;Showing off your status and wealth makes you seem less co-operative.&quot; &quot;Flashy&quot; and &quot;status clothes&quot; are words&#x2F;phrases that don&#x27;t even appear in the article.

I know some folks that own a successful clothing company. The wife is one of the top designers in the field. She&#x27;s won all kinds of accolades, and is respected by the top people in the world (but not well-known, outside the industry).<p>They wear expensive clothes, but it&#x27;s not noticeable, unless you really look. I suppose they &quot;put on the ritz,&quot; when they go to industry events, but I don&#x27;t attend those.<p>Some of the humblest, most down-to-earth folks I&#x27;ve ever known.

a study of people putting status symbols on online avatars made them less likely to be cooperated with to perform menial tasks is what it actually says<p>“Science”

On the other hand, not signalling your status will make some people feel entitled to disrespect you or treat you in a patronising way, due to their skewed social perception. Try attending some business dinner with regular clothes, to name an example. Some people out there are dying to buy the clothes you could buy but couldn&#x27;t care less about.

Except for use of logos, it&#x27;s interesting to look at this through the lens of upcoming Burning Man.<p>This line caught my eye...<p>&gt; ...when a group that participants wanted to join stressed its desire for co-operative, prosocial people — the participants tended to become strategically modest...<p>In some camps and groups at least, cooperative and prosocial people are what you want. And in theory that&#x27;s what the larger Burning Man experience is&#x2F;can be. There are some pretty chill camps I&#x27;ve been in where very unassuming people are actually very fascinating individuals with very intriguing lives.<p>But at the same time, costumes and clothing are part of the fun. People wear some wild stuff. That said, there is clearly a boundary you can step over with clothing that will create a very negative reaction. Think feather headdress, sequins, etc. Think so called &quot;influencers&quot; trying to get their next photo shoot out to Instagram.

...under such artificial and constrained experimental circumstances that the title is somewhere between &quot;quite misleading&quot; and laughable.<p>That I&#x27;ve noticed, most grown-ups have a fairly decent sense of what social messages their clothing might send, and how others will likely react.

If a company wants me to advertise their brand by wearing their logo, they can come negotiate a contract with me. Why else would I want to be a walking billboard? I assume people who wear such things are 1: terribly insecure, and B: terrible negotiators.

This is surprisingly unexpected to me given that we know how the _opposite_ is true if you replace &quot;wearing flash clothes&quot; with &quot;being pretty&quot;. Perhaps there&#x27;s something to be said about natural beauty vs artificial beauty?

When I’m at work - in person or remote - the work uniform is plain and unremarkable.<p>If at a trade show, or big internal presentation, then some degree of ‘flair’ is helpful.

In addition to the use of still photos, this study has a problem in that dress is indicated to the subjects before they make a choice that is distilled down to trust, and the choice game is known to test trust by a substantial portion of the public. While it makes some intuitive sense to appear disarming to win the trust of strangers in some real-life contexts, I wouldn’t rely on this study to corroborate that.

I wonder if something similar applies to cars; anecdotally, people seem less likely to let a shiny Audi Q7 merge compared to an old Skoda or something.

The first two studies don&#x27;t seem like they lead to this conclusion at all. Someone choosing luxury branded clothes on a virtual avatar is completely different from actually wearing luxury branded clothes.<p>The third study regarding social media would be interesting if I had access to it. But I&#x27;m still wondering if this translates to in person communication.

Counterpoint: Patagonia vests worn by many bay VCs and tech &#x2F; finance bros - they seem to have no trouble making deals.

This reminds me of US Polo and GAP. Their logo keeps getting bigger and bigger on the clothes. I like the Japanese Brand, Muji[1], which has no logo, nor markings at all on their products.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Muji" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Muji</a>

In the fashion buying world, high end brands will force stockists to buy a certain number of units of the logo crap (tees etc) in order to get units of the more desirable&#x2F;unique seasonal pieces. FWIW, as someone who leans toward a lot of high end, most of the work of shopping is wading through that junk.

It’s interesting as many financial frauds tends to flex flashy clothes with logos and people trust them a lot.

This is silly, as you obviously have to consider <i>who</i> the interaction is with and what context it is.

Flashy&#x2F; status clothes are valuable to the extent that they are a reliable and costly signal of wealth.<p>The experimental design had participants believe the branded (virtual avatar) clothes were acquired at zero cost, making them useless as a signal of wealth.

Great, now all the supervisor-management-efficiency-productivity-optimization junkies have a perfect reason to mandate uniforms in workplaces that don&#x27;t require a uniform. Way to go.

I wear colourful, and sometimes expensive, clothes all the time. My experience is that people are <i>more</i> willing to cooperate with me rather than less.

I know it&#x27;s a cliche, but I always thought that expensive clothes that scream brands (LV, Gucci, etc) are for poor people who want to look rich.

if I had the choice between cooperating with narcissists or with caring people, I&#x27;d also take the latter.<p>Often we don&#x27;t have the choice.

I can&#x27;t bring myself to bring off brand trainers for some reason, I think I&#x27;ve been propagandised

Where I live Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Burberry are not high status brands, but cheap knockoffs.

I remove any stitched on logos from my clothes before wearing them...

Frankly, I judge a person by their personal email address.

The opposite is true for shoes&#x2F;footwear.

A friend from the fashion industry&#x27;s distilled and mostly-verbatim wisdom:<p>Learn what expensive fabric feels like. Have a friend buy you 4 price tiers of clothing with the exact same fabric composition; try them on blindfolded. Focus on fabric only, not fit. At some price point you will stop feeling a difference. There&#x27;s no reason to pay for what you can&#x27;t feel.<p>A 100-dollar shirt tailored for 30 dollars exceeds a 500-dollar shirt in appearance but not in feel.<p>A hoodie is a hoodie at any price point.<p>All denim looks identical. Jeans that are the exception to this rule usually come from smaller makers, usually cost over 250 dollars, and usually last 5 to 7 years, and will look best midway through its life when the way in which the threads wear betrays its quality, like a proper Persian rug.<p>A 200-dollar suit is like a paper bag, no matter your tailor.<p>Your tailor is your shirt&#x27;s second-best friend. Your shirt&#x27;s best friend is diet and exercise.<p>If you dress too similarly to your colleagues, you are a school of fish. If you dress too differently, you are a shark, or a squid, or some other thing. Neither of these is a great idea.<p>Never mention the brand of your clothing. Ever. Seriously.<p>A logo is a brand&#x27;s way of forcing you to mention them.<p>And finally, my favorite:<p>Look on the street. Nearly everyone is wearing something boring. And everyone got up in the morning and looked in the mirror and thought, &quot;this is okay.&quot; If you saw one of my models walking along the street before we shoot, they would be the same! — except they&#x27;re wearing beauty, also. But nobody believes buying the clothes could ever make you look that way. So that can&#x27;t be what we&#x27;re selling, no? What we are doing is taking a beautiful human and deciding what furniture to place them on, how to adjust their posture and expression, what country we&#x27;ll be in, the exact hour of day, whether our photographer makes it all seem triumphant or melancholy or joyful or pensive. There must be some art to it, or everyone on the street would walk around looking as though they are moving from frame to frame in a series of friezes, and no one would pay me. You even know you are buying a fantasy from me, don&#x27;t you? [Sure.] And can you tell me what that fantasy is? Not beauty... even the model&#x27;s beauty is in service to, the idea that for a moment, everything in life falls into this perfect kind of space, some harmony... So to be stylish is to both take all this constantly in the same moment you appear that these things do not even exist to you — that you are as you might find a bird perched in a tree, just being, and meanwhile God smiled a beautiful poetry upon you. But I am guessing this is not the recommendation you were looking for.