The Devil Wears Printed Kurtas

On fashion, identity and being an employee in 2023

Apparently, if you wear a bright color, you should pair it with a neutral one. Having more than two colors in an outfit is risky, and not easy to balance. The color wheel can help figure out what colors go together. I have learned these things in the past week.

Until this point in my life, I did not care what I was wearing. I have had the same clothes for years, and the new ones are almost always gifted by family. Recently, I started to care about my outfit, obsessing over what I wear to work every day.

There’s your traditional Balcony plot: why this change? What happened, and what do we think of it? So let’s get into it.

Edgy Outfits

For the past three months, I’ve been working from office. We work out of a shared workspace where I often find myself surrounded by strangers, whether on lifts or common spaces.

My default wardrobe for this time has been a random polo t-shirt and a pair of jeans with sports shoes. Slowly, though, I have started to feel uncomfortable with the fact that no-one takes note of me. All they think is - another person, working a corporate job, coming to work in generic business casuals; nothing new under the sun.

I have felt sad thinking about myself this way: just another person, working in marketing or some such at a startup. Like evvverybody else. But I’m not like everybody else. If clothes are meant to be about self-expression, can I express through my outfits that I’m more than that?

That is the question that led me to learning more about fashion. For a few days, I tried wearing interesting outfits to work, from a printed kurta one day to just a nice t-shirt the other. I ignored the stack of plain polo t-shirts in my wardrobe. The experiment, however, never led to the satisfaction I sought, and I think the reasons behind that are a bit deeper than the outfits themselves.

Lying to Myself

French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre talked about the concept of ‘bad faith'. The common meaning of the phrase ‘operating in bad faith’ is someone who’s being deceptive, not being honest in dealing with other people. Sartre turns this phrase inward, arguing that we can be in bad faith with our own selves.

I’ll explain the way I understand this with an example. I once overheard a conversation in college which went this way:

“I’m not a smoker, bro. I’m trying to quit.”

“I don’t think you can call yourself a smoker *unless* you’re trying to quit. Smokers are essentially people who are trying to quit and failing at it.”

What this person deftly did was change what it meant to be a smoker. It sounds like that’s someone who is at peace with their smoking, but according to him, almost no-one ever is. Sartre would’ve agreed. For him, a person clinging only to their freedom to quit (I’m quitting tomorrow!) and denying their current reality (I’m not a smoker!) would be someone who’s in bad faith. They fit the definition of a smoker through their actions, but deceive themselves in not owning up to that identity.

In the exact same way, it is in bad faith for me to say that I’m not a marketer. A marketer is someone who works in marketing. I fit that definition, and if I choose to disown it, I am conveniently hiding only in my freedom and not acknowledging the current facts of my life.

Like the situation with smokers, perhaps all marketers are people who work in marketing while desperately wanting not to be seen just as marketers. In that case, I am much more of a marketer than I lead myself to believe.

The Bad Faith Wardrobe

For Sartre, bad faith is an inevitability - it is not possible to be truly authentic, since all forms of ‘being authentic to myself’ are identity prisons out of which I am always free to escape. Not recognizing that freedom would be bad faith just as much as leaning into it too much is. We are always either denying our current reality, or our freedom to transcend it. There is just no getting out of this predicament.

The resolution to the original conflict, then, is this: If I *am* a marketer, it is also true that I am not *just* a marketer. Trying to reflect one of those truths in my outfit is always a denial of the other. Correlating identity so strongly with what I wear is then always a losing game.

I have now gone back to the comfort of polo t-shirts, concluding that the identity game is futile at large. That we come to work in checked shirts and trousers says nothing of our internal lives. We all share the predicament of being boxed into roles that don’t speak to our whole self, and that is the condition that we must make peace with.

More Bad Faith Examples

My current wrestles with bad faith end here, but I am a bit nerdy about this stuff and thought of a few more examples of it that you might enjoy.

1. In The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep is choosing between two belts, and her new intern played by Anne Hathaway chuckles, thinking they look exactly the same. It’s clear she thinks it’s a bit ridiculous how the people in that room obsess over fashion. This is what Meryl Streep says in response:

Okay, I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet, and you select that lumpy blue sweater because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back […] It’s sort of comical how you think you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.

Where’s the bad faith? Streep’s point is that we are all inevitably communicating something with what we wear. In thinking it doesn’t matter, Hathaway’s character is in denial of the fact that she is equally obsessive about her outfit. Staying casual is as much of an obsession with fashion as being ‘dressy’.

2. In the book No Logo, Naomi Klein deconstructs the brand as a tool of capitalism. It’s a fascinating book in which one of the things she talks about is “ironic consumption”. It’s the idea that since we cannot escape consumerism and branding, we participate in it ironically. We wear the big brands and watch the franchise movies but without giving into their sincere allure. The brands, then, simply capitalized on this ironic consumption:

In this complicated context, for brands to be truly cool, they need to layer this uncool-equals-cool aesthetic of the ironic viewer onto their pitch: they need to self-mock, talk back to themselves while they are talking, be used and new simultaneously.

Two brands come to mind. dbrand, the phone case brand, which is explicitly rude to its customers on social media, abandoning the principles of branding but only to create new ones. Another is Nothing, the smartphone company whose name suggests the lack of a brand altogether, but of course, that is the brand for people who think they’re above identifying with a brand.

Where is the bad faith? Simply in the fact that these are brands that are selling products, but to be ‘cool’ brands, they have to be in bad faith, denying that the people in those companies are building brands while doing exactly that.

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I allowed myself to nerd-out in this edition more than I typically do, but I hope that was somewhat enjoyable to you. If you liked it, do share this with a friend. It’s the best way to support my work. See you soon with another edition!