Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>Poor people tend to dress up well
I certainly see lots of poor people in New York who pay lots of attention to their dress. And lots of better off people, mostly men, who look like hell.
Doug
^^^^^
My anecdotal experiences agree with Wojtek, Doug and Liza's generalizations. I am glad to attribute this to the higher social IQ's of people in oppressed groups to some extent.
On the other hand I have to wonder whether the fact that people in oppressed groups have enough problems in their average day due to their social location makes them seek to minimize that by at least minimizing hassles for bad appearance. In most experiences during their average day , they are in subordinate roles. Welloff people have a lot of "surplus" social points to burn, because they are more often in dominate social roles. They don't have to be worried about being judged (with consequent treatment) as much as poor people.
So, though Wojtek is correct that some may be more concerned about what others think about their appearance, for some it is not so much because they care about the other people more than rich people do, but that they are more vulnerable to judgment by so many more other people than rich people are.
Also, clothes are one of the cheapest status symbols. House/residential location, cars, whatever all cost more.
So, poorer and more oppressed people are doomed to follow the dictum "Clothes make the (person)". When actually, clothes do only make the person superficially, for very limited circumstances, and don't get them much more money, which is what they really need. Clothes can break a poor person, but they can't make one. Oppressed people are forced to develop a discipline of dressing up, to squeeze out the maximum social status from dress.
One wicked twist here is that sometimes Black people can get social demerits for dressing too fancifly or too "Black". Cf. "Superfly".
Charles