Read the passage and then answer the questions.

THE LANGUAGE OF CLOTHES Clothes 'speak': people judge others by what they wear. Here is a psychological attempt to find out how this works, experimentally.

The story is told of a Wall Street banker who was asked how much he would have to be paid to go to his office in his wife's hat. The longer he thought about it, the greater the amount required grew. He finally decided that no amount would be big enough, for by doing so he would have lost his greatest asset, his reputation.

We are not at all clear why fashions- in clothes or anything- exist or why they change (except on economic grounds). But fashion in women's clothes provides a good area to study this, for its changes appear to be fairly fast, as well as of considerable interest to nearly all women.

Common sense tells us that people judge others by the clothes they wear -

but until recently there were no experiments to show just how this operates.

In a study I did, six selected pictures from fashion magazines were shown to a group of fifteen-year-old grammar school girls. The pictures were of outfits ranging from the way-out to the very ordinary. The girls were told that they were to answer a series of questions about what kind of person would in practice wear such clothes.
They agreed about a lot of things, the age of the wearer, for example - to within a couple of years. Occupational status was equally well agreed, as was where the girl was going when wearing this outfit, whether she was married or not and the number of her boy friends, her sexual morals and the type of hobbies she preferred. Agreement was strong about smoking and drinking habits and about certain personality characteristics - how snobbish or funloving, how shy, rebellious or gay she was. Although the relative prestige of her job was clear to the schoolgirls, her degree of education was not so easy to tell.
Clothes, then, act as a medium of communication, as a language. This investigation indicated how we judge people by what their clothes tell us.
But if clothes are a language, then, like any other language, might they not be used to lie?
The girls were asked to complete a questionnaire about what clothes they felt described themselves as they thought they really were as well as how they would like to be. Mter, they were asked how much they liked each outfit. Sure enough, they preferred the outfits which matched their ideal selves rather than their 'real' selves.
There was more agreement as to what was fashionable than what was liked - which on first glance seems to mean that girls can be told what is fashionable but not made to like it. One suggestion for the way fashions come about is that some groups of fashion leaders introduce clothes they like and that because of their prestige, they are copied by the rest. This appears to fit the reaction of the schoolchildren in my study although other recent work suggests that this might be wrong.
In this other case, standard drawings of current - but clearly unfashionable - dresses were used. The results suggest some interesting conclusions.
Fashion seems to reflect the ideal person in the society. What clothes are fashionable depends upon the extent to which they indicate this ideal. It is not that clothes are fashionable because designers say they are, or because fashionable persons wear them, but people are fashionable because they wear fashionable clothes.
This still does not explain, however, why fashions change. Presumably it happens that, because girls who are not fashionable like fashionable clothes, there will be a continuing tendency for them to adopt and wear them. This will have the effect of modifying the message conveyed by the clothes. For example, a short skirt will not continue to look daring when everyone is wearing one. Consequently, to continue to express the same thing, the fashionable girl will have to try out new styles and ideas. Thus the process is unending and we have fashion.

One of the odd things about fashion is that as clothes go 'out' they are not just forgotten about - but they become actively disliked. I studied the apparent attractiveness of some different outfits, representatives of various years in the period 1900-1968. In eighteen-to twenty-one-year-olds, among both men and women, liking for the clothes declined steadily from 1968 back to about 1953 and remained low untill910.
The only factor, so far studied, that caused any difference in the pattern of taste was age. Older women slightly preferred the fashions of 1956 to those of 1968 (the years between were not studied) and they did not reach the depths of their dislike until as far back as 1930. It looks as if the older woman inevitably takes longer to accept the newer fashions, indicating that, for her, fashion may be more of an acquired taste, and that by definition, raw, new fashion, cannot fit the older woman's image of herself.
However the question that fascinates the psychologist is why, after being so popular, yesterday's fashions look so repulsive, especially when it is noticed that the most hated clothes were all the rage when the nineteen-yearold judges were three.
One possibility is that clothes come to change their meaning. Older clothes become dowdy. However very old styles are so different from present ones that they cannot be considered alongside them. They are consequently judged on their merits, not as clothes, more as works of art.
From K. Gibbins, New Society, 4 June 1970

(a) The author's first experiment showed that people judge others by what they wear. In your own words describe what kind of information clothes communicate about the wearer.

(b) What conclusions does he draw from the second experiment?

(c) What reasons does the author suggest account for changes in fashion?

(d) In the author's opinion yesterday's clothes are not just forgotten but actively disliked. Do you agree with him? How do you account for this?

(e) Which of 'yesterday's fashions' do you yourself most dislike?