Beyond appearance: how clothing shapes self-confidence through self-expression and social identity in a collectivist context

Abstract

Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, this study examined how clothing relates to self-confidence among 312 Bangladeshi university students (72. 4% male), testing whether the internal and external pathways described by enclothed cognition and impression management theory remain separable when the self is culturally construed as interdependent rather than independent. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a provisional, internally cross-validated two-factor structure distinguishing Self-Expression and Performance Confidence from Social Identity and External Influence Confidence, though the two factors were strongly correlated ( r = 0.79), and a second-order model fit the data equivalently well. Female students reported higher self-expression confidence than male students [t (310) = −3.48, p =0.001], and hierarchical regression showed that psychological predictors, social influence confidence and appearance-related academic-performance belief, explained substantial additional variance beyond demographics (ΔR 2 = 0.356), together accounting for 39.4% of variance in self-expression confidence. Thematic analysis of 22 interviews and 183 open-ended responses identified five themes: comfort and authenticity; clothing as context-specific “armor”; the social gaze; identity negotiation; and inner self-reliance, which converged with, complemented, and in one case qualified the quantitative findings. The strong association between internal and external confidence dimensions is consistent with self-construal theory and prior cross-cultural evidence that impression management operates more automatically for people from collectivist backgrounds, suggesting these pathways may be less distinguishable in this context than in the largely Western samples on which the underlying theories were developed. The Social Identity dimension showed weaker psychometric performance and should be interpreted as exploratory. Findings extend enclothed cognition and impression management theory to a collectivist South Asian context and offer directions, rather than validated recommendations, for higher education, student counseling, career preparation, and fashion education.