They’re known for their red dungarees – and it’s a uniform that influences the girls’ thought processes, too, says Charlotte Weatherly, Assistant Head of Knighton House, Dorset
No mention is made of dungarees in John Carl Flügel?s 1930s article The Psychology of Clothes, published in issue 18 of International Psychoanalytical Library. Much is made of how particular items of clothing ?serve the motives of decoration, modesty and protection?, but nothing about the dungaree.
That we undergo profound psychological changes when we put on specific clothes has long been known, although it is only recently that the concept has been given its own name. ?Enclothed Cognition? (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2012, by H Adam and AD Galinsky) was created to describe ?the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer?s psychological processes?, but with the caveat that the influence of clothes depends on wearing them and their symbolic meaning. In the deep past, dungarees were squarely in the category of workwear; of a cheap, coarse, thick cotton, either blue or white, they were originally worn by the very poor in India. In the boom years of 19th-century American expansion, they reappeared as the go-to attire of railroad and construction workers; savvy pioneers looking to get ahead and get rich. Not so in 2019; dungarees (and their cool sister, the jumpsuit) feature in fashionable wardrobes because they are so versatile.
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