John Travolta is in his auteur era, and he wants everyone to know it.
The 72-year-old actor is showcasing his directorial debut, Propeller One-Way Night Coach, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and marked the transition to the director’s chair by dressing as an old-school impresario. Travolta has been traversing various red carpets wearing a selection of jaunty berets (he had four in rotation: in black, navy blue, brown and cream) paired with thin, wire-framed spectacles and a dramatic dyed brunette beard. The images were quickly memed online, with comparisons ranging from a Guess Who? character to Ed Harris’s Christof in The Truman Show.
But this dramatic new look wasn’t a publicity stunt or a failed first outing with a new stylist. No, this was Travolta dressing for the job he wanted. The Grease star explained in a CNN interview that he chose the look while scrolling through pictures of legendary directors, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. “I said, ‘I’m a director this time,” Travolta explained. “I looked up pictures from the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and the old-school directors wore berets and the glasses. And I thought, ‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m doing an homage to being a director, so I’m going to play the part of being a director.’”
Dressing for the job you want is an adage we ought to take note of. No matter how much effort you put into getting dressed each morning, the way we dress affects how we feel about ourselves and how others perceive us. It’s all based on the psychological idea of “enclothed cognition,” which means that the clothes you wear can influence your confidence, behavior and self-esteem. Take that to the next level, though, and researchers have found that the way you dress can be linked to your likability in the workplace, career progression and overall success.
Samantha Harman, a style strategist for women in business and author of Just Get Dressed: Why You Have Nothing to Wear… and What to do About It, says that if you’re going for a promotion at work or eyeing a bold career pivot like Travolta, the first place you should look is your wardrobe. “The decision to promote you is not made in the moment,” she says. “It’s made in the everyday when you’re coming into the office and how you’re presenting yourself and how you’re showing up.” Harman claims she used her wardrobe to get ahead at work: she got promoted four times in five years while working as a magazine style editor. “My role was very public-facing; I was coming into the office and showing my boss that I was the person they could rely on to represent the company at different events and meetings,” she says.
So, if you’re in a middle management position but secretly manifesting that executive corner office, should you mog your colleagues and turn up in a full suit on casual Fridays? Actually, yes, says Harman. Research suggests so, too. In a 2012 study published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers put the enclothed cognition theory to the test by asking a group of participants to wear a white lab-style coat. They told one half that they were wearing a doctor’s coat and the other half that it was a painter’s overcoat. They studied the two groups’ behavior and found that those wearing the doctor’s coat had increased attentiveness and carefulness, suggesting that when clothes carry symbolic meaning, the wearer’s behavior can change. In the context of Travolta, then, cosplaying as an 1980s film director may have helped him get into character and play the part.
If you are going to dress to manifest your future job, then pay attention to the smaller details in your wardrobe. Studies have found that how you present yourself can be judged based on several biases at work. For example, if your clothes appear outdated, then others may presume your skill set is out of date, too. A 2019 study by psychologists at Princeton University found that subtle indicators of wealth in clothing influenced how competent a person was perceived to be at work. Researchers showed the same faces with different upper-body clothing to a group of independent judges who rated whether they looked “richer” or “poorer,” and, surprise, surprise, the faces wearing the “richer” clothes were judged as significantly more competent. Dressing well may help you get ahead on the corporate ladder, albeit due to depressingly omnipresent classist norms.
Other biases come into play, too. Your boss may look more favorably on you, for example, if you share a similar taste in style. It shows that you understand them, and perhaps you have something in common. Research study commissioned by British retailer Debenhams found that managers favor employees who mirror the way they dress, with more than two-thirds of managers admitting they had a “heightened awareness” of staff with a similar style to themselves. Such colleagues “gain brownie points.”
Harman says that style is an unspoken language that can often say more than words, especially at work. “We all have an innate ability to read information about people based on what they’re wearing and this goes back many years,” says Harman. “Style has been a form of communication for longer than the written word.”
And there’s also the self-esteem benefits. Judging by the pictures of Travolta at Cannes, he was clearly feeling pretty good about himself. The term “look good, feel good,” may be a cringe-worthy “live-laugh-love” adjacent mantra, but it holds up. “Every time that I’ve updated my style, that’s come with an identity shift and good things come from that,” says Harman. “I’m sure John Travolta is having a lot of fun just expressing himself through his style.”
If you’re planning on overhauling your wardrobe, for manifestation purposes (or just to win over your boss), Harman recommends thinking about what each item represents. “I would go through my wardrobe and look up what reflects the past and things that I no longer want to hold on to and what reflects who I want to be in the future,” says the style strategist. “Our wardrobes are the physical manifestation of our beliefs, our identity, politics, gender, class and societal expectations.”
For most of us, a wardrobe overhaul is less about swapping in a rotation of berets and strolling down a Cannes red carpet, and more about subtle shifts in how we present ourselves day to day. But for Travolta, the approach appears to have worked: he was presented with a prestigious Cannes Palme d’Or for his new film (which is based on his own 1997 children’s novel of the same name). Naturally, he collected the prize in a cream beret from his now-signature collection. Maybe this is a lesson for all of us to put on some new headgear, or a power suit, and start manifesting. The difference between aspiration and achievement might just be a well-judged accessory.
