Does Our Music Taste Dictate Our Style?

We live in a world where you can’t judge a book by its cover, but for some reason, we still deem it appropriate to judge a person by their outfit. And though this can lead to pretty nasty things like misjudgement and prejudice, when it goes well, it can lead to the formation of some friendships, as we can kind of guess whether you’ll get along with someone based on their outfit, and there’s a reason for this.

Oftentimes, there are many ways that we attempt to reveal our inner selves to the outside world; we dye our hair an unnatural colour, or we customise our clothes to try and give little snippets of the person who lies beneath them. But can we really tell that much about a person from what they’re wearing?

There are basic things that we expect to have an influence over a person’s style; we expect things like age, and career to slightly dictate what they wear every day, but there are also deeper factors that can change the way we expect people to dress. These are the aspects of a person’s personality! We expect this to be a big enough part of them that it seeps into how they allow themselves to be perceived. This can include their hobbies, what they enjoy, favourite colours, movies, all of it!

Specifically, people tend to allow their music taste to influence their clothing. Think about it, we have expectations of what people who listen to a certain band or genre of music will dress like, for example, there’s the stereotype of people who listen to goth rock dressing with a gothic style. This means that when we see someone in full goth attire, we think we can guess what they’re listening to, but are we right in thinking this? Do we really dress like our music tastes?

Now, there are two types of people in this instance:

The Secret Keeper

This is the silent listener, the quiet enjoyer, the secret keeper; the person who keeps their music taste under their skin, and not on their clothing. These are the people who exclusively have private playlists on Spotify, and treat sharing songs with others like hidden love notes for them to decipher. They’re the reserved type; they take a while to warm up to you, and once you find out the type of music they listen to, you’ll genuinely be surprised.

They might be fully immersed in grunge fashion, and listen almost entirely to Taylor Swift, or be the poster-person for Cottage Core style and listen only to Heavy Metal. They’ll keep you on your toes and make you feel awful for ever making a judgment. They make you question what you think you know about music, and fashion, and life. And it shakes you more than you’d care to admit, it makes you think that you really can’t know anything about people without talking to them (which probably isn’t a harmful realisation).

The one with nothing to hide

And then there’s the other type of person. This is the person who makes their music taste central to their entire person, and this includes their outfits. Catch them in band t-shirts, covered in merch, and with clothes stained with the lyrics of their favourite songs. With these people, you should probably just assume that every piece of clothing that they’re wearing is some kind of niche reference to a song that’s buried deep within their favourite artist’s discography.

This is the person who might wear their heart on their sleeve, and when they love, they love wholeheartedly, with everything in their chest. This is why they find ways to wear their music taste, because just listening to the music isn’t enough; they need to find a way to show their love outwardly. They feel so deeply for the music that they just can’t hide it. They are often annoyingly aesthetic, as they tend to match the vibe of their favourite artist impressively well, resulting in them being annoyingly cool. This is the type of person that, if you haven’t already guessed what music they listen to, you’ll be kicking yourself for not knowing it when they tell you.

Facing the music

Ultimately, however way you enjoy your music, whether you choose to do it by letting it wash over you and your outfits, it doesn’t affect how big of a fan you are. We just all express our love in different ways, and we choose to share more or less of ourselves to the outside world.

But there’s no hierarchy, there’s no rule for how we must enjoy our music, and how we must dress accordingly to the melodies in our ears. How reflective our outfits are of our inner selves only shows the way we choose to let people in – for some, the music they enjoy dominates their style, for others it merely dictates what they listen to. So, we might be able to tell a lot about a person from what they wear: we can infer their hobbies, their interests, their taste in music, but only if they choose to let us.