Summary
When most people hear the term “personal uniform” they imagine wearing the same outfit every day. But if you tend to wear the same color palette, silhouette and clothing style every day, you are actually wearing a personal uniform, even though the outfits are slightly different. To see how this works, just take a look at how costume designers often dress TV characters in their own personal uniforms.
You can check out the final story I created on my instagram here.
My process
Idea
About a year and a half ago, I started re-watching Friends and noticed that the character Rachel wore mini-skirts pretty consistently - so much so that it was essentially a uniform. I thought it would be cool to demonstrate different types of personal uniforms through the lens of characters in pop culture because:
a) Costume designers have already done the hard work to put them together
b) It’s a great way to demonstrate a variety of different styles of uniforms as worn by different types of people
Hypothesis
Characters in pop culture have personal uniforms.
Finding examples
I started with Rachel from Friends because she is one of the most famous TV characters in history - especially for her style. There are so so so so so many articles about her style, so it was pretty easy to start building a photo inventory of her mini skirt outfits. I took screenshots and built a collage in powerpoint.
I also decided to make a color palette based on the images I had collected - that’s at the top of the collage.
No one is convinced with just one example, so I decided to do some more research and see if I could prove my hypothesis that TV characters have personal uniforms.
In order to do this, I needed to be able to gather enough photos of a character wearing a certain piece (e.g. Rachel Green wearing a mini skirt). Since I didn’t want to spend hours watching random shows just to see if characters were wearing a uniform, I decided to narrow my search to TV characters from shows that had many seasons and a main character known for their style.
I needed a show that had been on the air for a long time because the more episodes -> the more screenshots from fans -> the more outfit photos to choose from. I also decided to start with shows whose main character has been known to have good style, because other bloggers have already done the work to take screenshots of the outfits for me.
The next character I decided to look into was Jane from Jane the Virgin. I was a huge fan of this show and remembered admiring the style of several characters (Jane and Petra, to be specific). After a quick Google image search of Jane’s outfits, I found that she is incredibly consistent with sundresses - woohoo!
I’ll go ahead and include all the collages I made for the other four characters included in my analysis.
Uniform analysis
Once I had my six examples, I struggled to figure out how to communicate this idea. The collages make the pattern clear and demonstrate variations of each character’s personal uniform, but it’s a bit overwhelming on its own.
Also, the concept of a ‘personal uniform’ isn’t that common. I think most people are generally familiar with the idea since there have been so many articles about Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck and Mark Zuckerburg’s hoodie, but since most people don’t want to wear the exact same outfit everyday, I wouldn’t say this is a commonly understood topic.
I decided to make a table of my six examples and see if there were interesting ways I could break this information up. I felt like it would be helpful to categorize the style of the characters. This led me down a huuuuuugeee rabbit hole investigating different styles. Did you know that ‘sexy’ is technically a fashion style? I didn’t. I went through about 15 websites and blog posts studying what people consider ‘Preppy’ vs ‘Classic’ and ‘Romantic’ vs ‘Sexy’. I realized that most of the characters (and real people in general) are typically a blend of several different styles.
Since this was a Wardrobe Science project, I immediately thought of using a Venn diagram to represent the blend of uniform styles. After spending a lot of time comparing the photos I had collected with common fashion styles found online, I listed what I felt most accurately represented each character’s uniform.
I also looked into defining the ‘image’ each of their uniforms projected. By the time it came to putting this all together, I felt like it was getting too complicated, so I decided to leave it out.
I also went down another rabbit hole with color palettes. There truly is so much to learn out there.
To combine this information in a visually appealing way, I decided to use the circles in the Venn diagram to represent the styles each character has and use the primary colors from their color palette as the colors of the circles.
I made the size of the circles reflect how much that specific style influences the character’s uniform. For example, I felt Jane’s uniform was equal parts Bohemian and romantic, so her Venn diagram circles are the same size and overlap. Mi-Young’s uniform is a blend of vintage, girly, and preppy, but based on the images I collected, vintage is the strongest of the three styles and therefore the largest circle.
Arranging all this information - the photos, the Venn diagram and the defining piece of the uniform was a real challenge. Below are some of the early iterations I tried.
I ended up keeping the photo collages at the top and bottom of the card and placing the Venn diagram in the center with a brief description directly below. It’s still quite a bit of information, but I felt like this was the best solution given the Instagram carousel format.
Anyways, if you read all the way until the end - thank you! This was a really fun project and I thought of so many other potential examples to feature in this analysis - I may do it again in the future!
Please let me know what you thought of this project or if there’s any other characters in pop culture I should feature in the future.
Maria
What is Wardrobe Science?
In 2017, I began tracking my wardrobe so I can build a dataset of real-world Capsule Wardrobe data to analyze. I was inspired to start this project after reading an article by Torrence Boone from Google, that tracked fashion trends by Google searches. Read his article here.