Thinking Fashion

Studies have shown that what we wear (and what we think of what we're wearing) has a link to how intelligent we perceive ourselves to be. I first found this story in the Vogue website and decided to look for the study myself to satisfy my curiousity. 

"In preliminary findings from a study published on the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology’s website, subjects who donned white coats that they thought belonged to doctors performed better on tests than those who wore street clothes, or those who thought the coats were associated with artists. Their heightened focus was evident only when subjects actually put on the coat in question (not merely when they were in the same room)," explains Katherine Bernard in a VOGUE.COM article. 

"This phenomenon is called enclothed cognition, meaning that if your brain links Miuccia Prada's or Phoebi Philo's collections with powerful, intelligent women, you’re likely to take on those attributes when you wear that Prada pleated skirt or Céline jacket," the article continues. 

See the full gallery on Posterous

All this talk of the Lab Coat reminds me of artlab's Bio Hazard Coat

Hm...   more on this "enclothed cognition," in the said study by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsk, they defined the term as "the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer's psychological processes," and proposes that clothes have diverse impact on the wearer via the (1) symbolic meaning of the clothes and the (2) physical experience of wearing them. 

The first worked on experiments that centered on wearing the lab coat (generally associated with attentiveness and carefulness), and they predicted how wearing a lab coat would increase performance on attention-related tasks. The predicted result was obtained through three experiments, (1) physically wearing the lab coat increased attention compared to not wearing a lab coat (2 and 3) wearing a lab coat (referred to as a doctor's coat) results were better than just wearing a lab coat (referred to as a painter's coat).

I wouldn't mind wearing something like this coat by CDG (via Street Peeper)