How Should We “Judge People by Their Looks” in This New Era?

Walk by, pass by — the eye misses nothing. In a flash, you can tell a hit when you see one.

If any one language is spoken everywhere today, “putting yourself together” is probably one of them — and quite possibly the richest of all.

Whether your mother tongue is English, Chinese, or some small regional language, your appearance has already announced your taste, your social rank, some part of your personality, and the private calculations you would rather not explain to anyone — all before you open your mouth. Everyone has stood in front of the closet picking things over, quietly plotting a work outfit that says “casual but still commanding, the kind you could close eight big accounts in the moment you walk out the door,” or a “mature, steady, dignified” outfit for meeting a partner's parents.

No one can know when they are about to be looked up and down, just as no one avoids looking others up and down. That clumsy sentence is really only trying to say: however far you have given up on life, you still have to put clothes on. Nudists are free enough, but most of them exercise that freedom at home.

“Judging people by their looks” is a phrase this article is going to wear out. Everyone knows it is not a compliment — it usually means shallow. But it is worth defending once: step outside, meet anyone at all, and judging by looks is unavoidable. Even people who never leave the house spend time working out which pose makes them more appealing. QDaily once interviewed the management of a luxury lingerie company, who said that how freely Chinese customers spend on expensive underwear is startling.

How well you judge by looks is a matter of skill. Don't equate it with showing off fashion trivia — accurate judgment does have something to do with that, since it is about putting yourself together, after all — but reading a great deal of information in a few seconds probably takes a full grounding in psychology and sociology… all right, all right: it takes knowing a little about how people actually work.

Say someone turns up to meet you with a head giving off a thick smell of shampoo and a shirt that has clearly been worn only a few times. You can guess how seriously they are taking the occasion. Or say someone wears a brand-new suit to a banquet and carefully smooths the crease in the trousers before sitting down: it is probably their first time at an event like this, and the outfit may be a large investment.

This exchange in the broad “language of dress” is instant. Often we read it without thinking, before we have time to turn what we see into words. How much we read, and how we read it, depends on what we know.

Alison Lurie, a professor at Cornell University, argued in her book The Language of Clothes that if we really treat dress as a language, it plainly has its own elements — vocabulary, grammar, dialects, even slang. That last one is fashion.

Not only clothes of every kind, but hairstyles, accessories, makeup, and even body modifications like tattoos, skin whitening and tanning, can all be treated as “words.” Follow a few “grammar rules” — the most basic being no more than three colors at once — and you combine these “words” into “sentences” that say different things.

You can spot plenty of underclassmen at a glance in college, and the main tell is not the younger face but the clumsy “language of dress” only just released from a school uniform. Their “vocabulary” is small; they can build only simple sentences out of the dozen or so “words” they have, conveying the most basic information, taking the first tentative steps toward a personal “style on the page” — fresh and stiff at once. Fashion leaders may have hundreds or thousands of “words” to choose from, use them fluently, and even set new “grammar rules,” so the “sentences” they compose are far more complex.

As with any language, expressing and receiving the “language of dress” inevitably produces misunderstanding and prejudice. Someone once joked about a mass brawl in Sanlitun, where employees of Lianjia and 5i5j came to blows over the same clients: “at least 50 black suits fighting it out on the street, very Johnnie To.” The “black suit” showed off its own ambiguity here. It can be a prop for building gangster atmosphere in a Johnnie To film, and because the real-estate brokerage business has such an unmistakable dress code, it has also become the broker's badge.

A “language of dress” that invites ambiguity, or carries stereotypes, is still perfectly able to carry information that can be read. We only need to be sharper and more careful when we read it.

Different vocabularies and the risk of ambiguity both make the “language of dress” harder to translate, but plenty of people have tried anyway: Alison Lurie, above; Umberto Eco, who examined blue jeans at length; and Paul Fussell, who gives a whole chapter of Class, his dissection of taste across social ranks, to how clothing gives away a person's standing. Their readings are sharp and original, and some of them still hold up. But because the “language of dress” also sheds the old and takes in the new as time passes, we probably need a new translation manual to make sense of the “words” and “sentence patterns” common now.

Given the breakthrough Google Translate's miraculous (neural machine) translation system has made, nearly reaching the level of a human translator, we sincerely suggest that everyone studying translation switch to the translation of the “language of dress” to avoid unemployment. The work involved is enormous.

Drawing on the parts of earlier research that have worn well, QDaily's long coverage of fashion, and relevant surveys from the QDaily Research Lab, we have put together some entertaining observations on judging people by their looks today. This is, of course, only a small part of this huge, sprawling universal language:

Beanies

Nick Fouquet, a French hatmaker, passes on this advice about wearing hats: “When you put a hat on, forget whether it looks good — remember to be confident,” because a hat suits everyone; it is just that “it is like life. You have to control the hat, not let the hat control you.” You can certainly wear a beanie; it is easier to carry off than a Panama hat or a painter's cap. But the fashionable way to wear a beanie is sometimes baffling in itself — with a T-shirt and shorts in summer, say. Besides forgetting whether it looks good, the more important thing is to forget that you are a warm-blooded animal, which is not easy. Anyone who can carry off a beanie in summer is capable of anything.

Dyed Hair

Dyeing your hair is a form of self-expression used about as often in the language of dress as it goes wrong. The people who, after long soul-searching, still go through with granny gray, silver or muted ash are always the ones out ahead of the trend: hair colors turn over as fast as O2O startups go under, and that is not an exaggeration. Dyeing your hair is rather like getting hooked on plastic surgery — once you have done it, you often cannot stop, and it tends to end in rainbow. As for those who did not choose to dye their hair of their own accord, they are probably not resilient enough: afraid that ignoring the stylist's advice will get them written off as tasteless, cheap, or a hopeless country bumpkin, they take one wrong step, end up with a bizarre color, and are miserable about it.

Hair Volume

Hair loss is a sorrowful thing, and very hard to alter by willpower, so mocking a balding head is not the right thing to do. If anything, we feel sympathy for it, even respect, because more often than not an openly thinning head of hair is the visible proof of a programmer's deep technical powers. That explains why they bare their steadily retreating hairlines with a clear conscience, rather than abandoning the hairline strategically the way many hairstylists do, shaving it all off to preserve one last shred of professional pride.

Round Glasses

To be exact, the “word” under discussion here is the round wire frame. Black acetate glasses have gone from the heavy, square, thick frames of years past to today's rounder, thinner ones, and the material has spread from plain acetate to distressed metal and raw wood. Wearing round acetate frames says at most that you are a nearsighted person keeping up with trends. Round wire frames are another matter — John Lennon's model is best — and they create a sense of “someone who has, after all, done some reading.” To underline the point, you can even reach through the empty frame and rub the sleep from your eye, to show you are not really nearsighted.

Choker

This collar-like necklace, short enough to sit above the collarbone and hug the neck, is indistinguishable from a dog leash in your mother's eyes, and belongs with ripped jeans and the bra top in the category of fashion items best described as “mom-detonating.” Girls who wore chokers used to be taken for rebellious punks, or for eccentric, spacey mystics in the mold of Phoebe from Friends. But in this wave of the trend, running from last year to now, so many fashionable young women wear chokers that it is hard to assign them a collective personality the way you would a star sign. What we can say for certain is that none of them live with their mothers.

Push-Up Bras

A weapon. Disarmament may come only once it is off. Before that, it is enough to give most (inexperienced) straight men any number of pleasant illusions. The drawback is that it gets stuffy, especially in summer, and the great majority of women who pick this style believe their real size is a B — in interview after interview with lingerie-app founders, you will find them repeating that this is a common misconception.

White Shirts with Checked Collars

A white shirt can look professional and upscale, and the worry that heavy work will leave grease on the collar is how the checked inner collar became the first choice for real-estate broker uniforms.

Primate-Head Prints

“Trendy brand” is by now an inflated term in the world of fashion: everything from the street bad-boy chic of Edison Chen and Shawn Yue to Taobao-made letter T-shirts with misspelled words at 40 yuan apiece gets called a trendy brand. Any T-shirt with a primate head printed on the chest — monkey, baboon or orangutan, it makes no difference — counts as riding the fashion wave. But carrying off a trendy brand generally comes down to a certain rough-edged swagger; if your bearing is not rough enough, a skateboard in hand tends to complete the set.

Vintage

This is not a style of clothing but an aesthetic. There is no end of brands representing it now; even Levi's puts out a retro line like “9th Street” while making stretch jeans on the side. The whole point is that nothing should carry the stiff, just-unwrapped smell of new clothes — even a shirt you have only just bought is best worn with the cuffs scuffed a little first. Note: this rule does not apply to office wear, because anyone who truly understands the rules of Vintage would not stoop to so-called office wear.

Logo

Take a bag priced above 10,000 yuan. A buyer whose bag is covered in logos, in a style that looks distinctly old, is likely a member of the middle class who thinks, “I can't afford luxury at full price, but a vintage piece I can manage.” Someone whose bag is covered in logos rendered as graffiti is a rich person who wants a touch of rebellion. Someone whose logo is hidden in the lining print is a rich person who wants to be understated. And someone whose bag carries no logo inside or out, only a small mark tucked away somewhere discreet — that one is hard to say. Hermès customers these days really do cover too wide a range.

Solid-Color T-Shirts

“Don't even try to read anything into me.” But doesn't this look rather spare, composed and artistic?

T-Shirts With Words On Them

A fluorescent T-shirt with a huge “BITCH” across it already looks too streetwalker. What is in fashion now is the staff shirt: Vetements, the hottest brand going, turned DHL's big yellow work shirt into a hit, which Paul Fussell surely never saw coming. He thought people who wore Coca-Cola staff shirts were lower-middle-class consumers poisoned by the big brands of capitalism, and never imagined that one day a crowd of jaded rich kids would use the same shirts to mock consumer society. Oh, and one more thing: literary youth look down on all of the above. If their T-shirt absolutely must have words on it, they will have a short line embroidered in tiny cursive on the chest, preferably in French. “Good morning,” say, or “This is life.”

Off-the-Shoulder

Geoffrey Henning, vice president of fashion design at J.C. Penney, says it is mainly young people who go for the loose style that bares the collarbone, while older people choose the kind with a hole cut in the sleeve that exposes only the triceps. But whichever style you choose, the people around you will decide it is not warm enough — wear an off-the-shoulder top out of the house and you can count on some well-meaning older person earnestly pulling it back up for you.

Light-Colored Down Jackets

A light-colored down jacket ranks far above one in black, olive or navy. By Paul Fussell's analysis of raincoats, a light color suggests that a person does not care in the least about the risk of a splashed stain; it has a “screw it, I don't care” force that cautious black lacks.

School-Name Hoodies

Someone wearing a campus shirt printed with a school's name — if they did attend that university — has very likely also answered a “what's it like to be a slacker / be gay / date someone / leave halfway through at School X” question online, reposts the anniversary tribute every year right on schedule, and, a year or two into a job, still insists on sending email from an address ending in “.edu,” all to display a particular brand of school feeling. If the school on the shirt is not the one they attended, they will look like an extremely athleisure study-abroad agent.

Cotton Maxi Dresses

This term was thoroughly worn out by Annie Baby (who, by the way, has renamed herself Qing Shan). Worn out does not only mean it became a required word for mocking literary youth online; it genuinely became an element of the literary-youth icon. Otherwise why would every wholesale clothing market have stall after stall selling the style? The lingering effect is that straight men have split into two camps: one rejects it outright, holding that only body-hugging clothes have any appeal; the other worships it blindly, holding that only a flowing long dress makes a real woman. Both are formulas.

Fake Layering

A style that wins mainly by making people feel they got a bargain. Some trendy brands use fake layering to make a sarcastic or playful point, but most brands use it simply to say good value. Either way, it tends to catch its customer with real precision.

Shirt Dresses, or Long T-Shirt Dresses

“Ha, you thought I had nothing on underneath?”

Big Ripped Jeans

Mainly used to create a romantic sense of homelessness, while adding some artificial difficulty to the act of getting dressed. Anyone who loves ripped jeans has to stay alert at all times, or a foot will catch in a rip on the way in, push in the wrong direction, and tear the whole thing in two.

Skinny

Umberto Eco, who wrote The Name of the Rose, also once studied blue jeans closely. One charm of jeans, he argued, is that they make the wearer look younger — not because of the “fantasy of youth” built up by jeans advertising, but because an overweight, out-of-shape middle-aged person simply cannot get into skintight jeans that fit like armor.

Yoga Pants

A garment that gives people courage, black ones above all. Anyone who pulls on black yoga pants believes she has dropped at least two sizes on the spot. The illusion itself does not matter; what matters is that it makes her brave enough to wear them anywhere. If the wearer is genuinely thin, she may even dare a top that does not reach past the hips. Which works out fine, as long as she has the right underwear on.

Micro Miniskirts

When a woman learns to keep this kind of clothing out of the office, she has grown up.

Men's Canvas Sneakers

Since wearing Converse makes you look like a broke student who never graduated, everyone had to switch to Vans. Vans once worked with Opening Ceremony, Kenzo Takada, Marc Jacobs, Rei Kawakubo and unknown young artists, and stood for tattoos, motorcycles and rock and roll. But what goes around comes around and heaven spares no one: these days it is printing Cony, the LINE Friends rabbit, on its shoes, so which brand cheap canvas sneakers should come from remains an unsolved mystery.

Red-Soled Shoes

More important than the red sole is the heel, because without it the red sole means nothing. And the point of wearing heels is never to lose your nerve: settling for a platform, or worse a flatform sole, will drop you any number of rungs. Plenty of women carry out this principle without hesitation, though they all slow down by more than half on uneven gravel.

Dirty Sneakers

“Dirty shoes” that come with dust and wear marks built in sell for four or five hundred US dollars a pair, which means spending 2,500 to 3,500 yuan to get a pair of sneakers so filthy your mother might throw them out for you. Wearing them says you are rich, and also that you want to be unlike all the other rich people.

Shoelaces

The way you lace your shoes has to carry some technical distinction — crisscross lacing for brogues, say, against straight-bar lacing for oxfords — to set yourself apart from the people who “are rich enough to buy these expensive shoes but have no idea how they are meant to be worn.”

Prayer Bead Bracelets

A man whose wrist is wrapped thick with a string of bodhi seeds usually also keeps, somewhere in his closet, a linen shirt with wooden buttons and a pair of drop-crotch harem pants, and gives off a tone of “I understand a thing or two” and “I cultivate body and mind, don't you all admire me.” He frequents private clubs with “lotus” in the name, burning incense, drinking tea, copying out sutras. And somewhere far away lives an undisclosed master, quite possibly called Rinpoche Nonsense.

“Man-Slayer” Perfume

A newly fashionable term with no clear product or brand behind it. The meaning is plain enough: “use this and men will fall at your feet.” This one does not really belong under judging by looks, though. First, because scent is intangible, and if it were strong enough to work on the spot it would probably come with other, more memorable traits; second, because too many of the fresh, light scents in fashion now simply do not last on the skin.

“Period Red”

A family of lipstick shades (which read very differently from brand to brand). Some men will never work out what period red is, just as they will never work out any of the names fashion gives to colors. Some finally learn what it is and announce that they find it repulsive. Some think, “great, but I would rather my girlfriend not wear that color.” For women, the only distinctions are “should I buy it,” “I'm going to buy it,” and “bought it.” Oh, and by the way, word is it is already out of style.

Apple Watch

Apart from gadget reviewers, people who buy an Apple Watch are likely those who cannot afford a Rolex and look down on Daniel Wellington, and so settle for declaring themselves quantified-self types who love managing their lives by technology. Because everyone around them wants to study it or try it on, they become the center of attention without effort, though the price is the indignity of having to swing the wrist back and forth several times to wake the screen.

Canvas Tote Bags

Alison Lurie had a name for all those T-shirts and similarly clumsy garments printed with messages you are expected to decode and admire: “legible clothing.” Plain canvas totes are especially prone to becoming legible clothing. Carry one printed with Andy Warhol, the Beatles or another artist bound up with pop culture, or with a simple bird (yes, bird motifs tend to be favored), and you become a walking bulletin board yourself. One printed with the Penguin Books logo says “I read difficult books.” A limited-edition “Karl Who” tote is meant to announce “I have an easygoing attitude to life,” “I understand luxury,” and above all “this is the cheapest thing that gets me anywhere near Kaiser Karl.”

Backpacks

There are pitiable jobs — young women at the Big Four accounting firms, for instance — that require heels to keep up an image of “professionalism” (we still don't know how heels came to be linked to professionalism, but plenty of company dress codes require women to wear them to work) while also requiring a laptop hauled to work in a backpack, every inch of them saying “life is hard.” That explains why so many fashionable backpacks have caught on. And of course there is another group who, to show that “I don't have to work myself that hard,” buy fashion backpacks in an XXXXXS size that holds only a few credit cards, a lipstick and a phone.

“Affordable Luxury” Bags

People who buy so-called affordable luxury bags are a year or two into a job at an advertising or PR firm, cannot yet afford luxury bags, but “there is no way I can ask my family for that much money for something really expensive, so these really are the only options.” Yet “affordable luxury” has joined “Simple European,” “Mediterranean” and “yuppie” in the most devalued cluster of words in contemporary Chinese marketing. What it actually means is: luxury you get looked down on for using.

Layering

Wearing several layers is a language of dress favored by people higher up the social scale. The usual middle-class version is an Oxford-cloth shirt over a turtleneck, or a gray or maroon crewneck wool sweater over an Oxford-cloth shirt. Paul Fussell once gave an extreme example: “a man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight wearing three shirts, the innermost bright red, then a yellow one, and on the outside a pale blue Oxford-cloth shirt with button-down collar points. He was not insane; only members of the upper-middle class could wear several layers of shirts like that.” Alison Lurie made much the same point: “In general, the more layers of clothing a person wears, the higher her or his social standing — it is a good way of showing how large the wardrobe at home is.”

All-Uniqlo

People who set out to build a stylish look entirely from Uniqlo basics, making Uniqlo not look like Uniqlo, are known as “head-to-toe Uniqlo youth.” It has to be said that, given how hard this is, they deserve to be treated as real beacons of fashion. And when the styling itself takes little energy, whether you pull it off comes down mostly to bearing.

Illustrations by: Lin Xiaoyao

QDaily Research Lab is a survey column at QDaily, an interactive platform for exploring all kinds of lifestyle questions. It may look at a change or trend in how people live, or at a particular brand's service. Here you can vote, vent, and state where you stand.

As for everything above, you are entirely welcome to add your own entries. And if you disagree, that is fine too — it is exactly what shows what “fashion” means.