Living in your clothes : when comfort becomes an aesthetic position

Start there, because it puts weight on an idea that has gone almost entirely unquestioned : clothing as message. For twenty years, fashion and a strand of social psychology have told us that getting dressed is an act of communication, a statement, a projection. The reading is not wrong. It is partial. It leaves out the most concrete fact about a garment : it is an object worn against the skin, fourteen hours at a stretch, in heat that does not negotiate.

To live in your clothes is to move the question. No longer "what does this say about me", but "can I live in this".

Does clothing really change the woman wearing it ?

The honest answer : partly, and on thinner ground than we were told. In 2012, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky published a study in the *Journal of Experimental Social Psychology* that gave the field a phrase, "enclothed cognition", the idea that a garment

influences the wearer's cognition through its symbolic meaning. One result travelled further than the rest. Participants wearing a doctor's white coat made half as many errors on a test of selective attention, the Stroop test.

More than six hundred citations in the scientific literature. More than one hundred and sixty media pick-ups. Then someone tested it. A pre-registered replication, run on a sample roughly three times larger than the original and published in the same journal, found no effect of the coat on performance. Adam and Galinsky said so publicly : the replication had been competently conducted, and it cast doubt on their initial result.

The story does not end there, and that is what makes it worth telling. In February 2025, C. Blaine Horton, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky published a meta-analysis in *Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin* covering 105 effects drawn from 40 studies and 24 articles, 3,789 participants in all. The conclusion comes in two parts. Work published before 2015 poses a genuine replicability problem. Work published after that date, conducted to stricter methodological standards, retains evidential value.

So : clothing probably does something. That something is more modest, more contextual and far less spectacular than the popularised version suggested. It is reasonable to hold that a garment acts on the state of the woman wearing it. It is not reasonable to expect a transformation from it.

Why clothing discomfort is not just a sensation

Where the psychology of dress wobbles, the physiology of tight clothing holds firm. In 2017, a study published in the journal *Gastroenterology* by the team of David Mitchell, Mohammad Derakhshan and Kenneth McColl, at the Section of Gastroenterology of the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, put a figure on a waist belt. Tightened, it raised intra-abdominal pressure by 6.9 mmHg when fasting and by 9.0 mmHg after a meal, and it aggravated gastro-oesophageal reflux, chiefly by degrading the oesophagus's capacity to clear itself.

Read that result for exactly what it is : a precise finding on a precise mechanism, obtained on a small sample of patients. It does not say that fitted clothes make you ill. It says that abdominal compression has consequences an instrument can measure, and that the discomfort felt under a belt pulled too tight is not a weakness of character. It is information the body is transmitting.

Then there is heat. Recent research on thermal comfort in hot climates, notably the field work published in 2026 in the *International Journal of Biometeorology*, compares loose and fitted garments head on, weighing ventilation against solar reflection. The physics is simple. A loose garment lets air move between fabric and skin, so heat escapes and sweat evaporates. A garment that clings prevents it. For loose cuts the structure of the fabric counts most ; for close-fitting ones, the fibre.

Is loose Maghrebi dress an archaism or a piece of engineering ?

The question has to be put flatly, because the way traditional Maghrebi dress gets looked at swings between two symmetrical errors : folklore and contempt. Neither does justice to what is first of all a tested technical solution.

The haïk is a rectangular length of cloth, roughly six metres by two metres twenty, wound around the body, held at the waist by a belt, then drawn over the shoulders and fastened with fibulae. Not an accessory. A system. It appears as the mlaya in eastern Algeria, the ksaa in the west, the melhfa among Sahrawi women and the sefseri in Tunisia, this last now all but vanished from everyday use. One intelligence runs through all of them : volume, fluidity, a surface that turns back solar radiation without trapping heat against the skin.

In 2024, at its nineteenth session, the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee inscribed the ceremonial women's costume of Algeria's Greater East on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, together with the knowledge and skills associated with the gandoura, the melehfa, the caftan, the quat and the lhef. The melehfa is described there as a wide, draped garment held at the shoulders by two silver brooches and at the waist by a long belt of dyed wool. The file notes that these skills pass down both within families and through training centres, and that they rest largely on the work of women.

Textiles in the Maghreb, by the numbers

• Tunisia : 9.5 billion dinars in textile and clothing exports in 2025, 75% of it to Europe (Tunisian Federation of Textiles and Clothing, Fédération Tunisienne du Textile et de l'Habillement, January 2026) • Tunisia : around 155,000 jobs in the sector (FTTH, 2026) • Morocco : more than 246,000 jobs and more than 46 billion dirhams in exports in 2024 (textile and clothing sector) • Morocco : around 75% women among direct employees in clothing (Moroccan Association of Textile and Clothing Industries, AMITH) What is striking about this continuity is how seldom anyone calls it continuity. The jebba, the djellaba and the caftan, all loose garments of the region, are filed under heritage, and heritage means past, when what they answer is a climatic constraint that has not gone away and is getting worse. Contemporary design is beginning to notice. At Tunis Fashion Week 2026, which opened on 16 April at the Sainte-Croix church in Tunis, the house TBR Haute Couture, founded by the designer Radhia Tayeg Ben Rhima, showed work that brought together craft, the nobility of the materials and Mediterranean influences. In Morocco, the magazine Shoelifer has documented the work of young designers reworking traditional caftans, among them Mouad Ladraa and his capsule collection *Rebirth*, built around khrib, dfina and lkbira caftans reworked to function better day to day.

What does dressing for yourself cost ?

This is where talk of style meets its wall. In Tunisia, the guaranteed interprofessional minimum wage rose on 1 January 2026 to 554.736 dinars gross per month for a 48-hour week, and to 470.251 dinars for a 40-hour week. At that level of income a wardrobe is not a site of experiment. It is a line of spending you compress.

The second-hand clothing trade has absorbed that constraint. According to Sahbi Maalaoui, president of the trade chamber for second-hand clothing industries and retail, interviewed by *L'Économiste Maghrébin* in May 2026, the sector has existed for about eighty years, generates around 200,000 jobs between retailers, wholesalers, workers and operators, and more than 90% of Tunisians buy their clothes there. In 2026 it absorbed a fall in volumes arriving from Europe and price pressure linked to the dinar's depreciation, while continuing to widen its clientele across every social category.

In Morocco, the 2022-2023 National Survey on Household Living Standards conducted by the High Commission for Planning (Haut-Commissariat au Plan, HCP), carried out among 18,000 households, puts average annual spending at 20,658 dirhams per person, with 38.2% of the budget going to food and 25.4% to housing and energy. What remains for everything else is narrow.

On the Tunisian side, the National Institute of Statistics (Institut national de la statistique, INS) isolates clothing, and the result is a surprise. In

What comfort does to self-presentation

its 2021 survey on household budget and consumption, clothing reaches 11.6% of spending, against 7.6% in 2015. Four points more in six years, in a country where income did not follow. The INS warns that these coefficients carry the mark of the Covid period and cannot be used to revise the price index. That reserve applies to fine interpretation, not to the order of magnitude : dressing weighs more on Tunisian budgets than it did ten years ago.

That changes the nature of the conversation. Telling a woman who shops second-hand that she ought to "invest in quality basics" is not advice, it is ignorance. Comfort, meanwhile, carries a real economic advantage that is rarely pointed out : a cut that does not compress gets worn longer, follows the body as it changes, and survives seasons and pregnancies. Ease is also a form of durability.

Comfort as an aesthetic choice is not the abandonment of self-presentation. It is another version of it. But that other version is not negotiated in a vacuum. It is negotiated under a gaze, and the gaze is not evenly distributed. An uncomfortable garment that "reads as serious" is not neutral : it transfers a physical cost onto the woman wearing it, in the name of a social legibility nobody formally decided on.

The study on the discriminatory social and gender norms behind gender-based violence, carried out by the sociologists Sihem Najar and Arbi Dridi and published in 2023 by the United Nations Population Fund in Tunisia together with the National Observatory for Combating Violence against Women, puts it plainly : the norms of dress, gesture and conduct are described there as dictated by the masculine, by the father, the neighbour, the passer-by, the young men on the corner. The research is qualitative, conducted in Greater Tunis in 2022 through interviews and focus groups. It documents a mechanism. It does not measure its scale.

What it does supply is cases. In a secondary school in El Menzah, an administrator defends the smock imposed on girls on the grounds that a pupil who lets parts of her body show disturbs the boys' concentration. The boys wear no smock. So the rule does not protect the girl who obeys it. It protects the attention of the person looking at her. Elsewhere in the same study, the mother of one participant, who dresses carefully for work in central Tunis, is pressed by her in-laws to adopt "more discreet clothing". Her work clothes are negotiable. Her husband's are not.

None of this is specifically Tunisian. At Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, a survey of 463 female students published in 2025 in the *Saudi Journal of Medicine & Medical Sciences* puts body image dissatisfaction at 17.9%. The team states plainly why it left men out of the sample : Omani social expectations around appearance, it writes, exert pressures specific to women. An Egyptian study usefully complicates the picture. Conducted by researchers at Mansoura University among 1,126 medical students and published in 2025 in *Scientific Reports*, it puts the prevalence of body dysmorphic disorder at 6.3%, with women accounting for 63.4% of identified cases, roughly their share of the sample. The pressure falls harder on women. It does not spare men.

One point needs stating here, and it is part of the subject. This work describes the norm. It does not count it. We found no Maghrebi survey quantifying the dress-related pressure exerted on women in the region. The question is being worked on : an analysis published in 2026 in *La Revue marocaine de la pensée contemporaine* by Youssra Tazi, of Hassan II University of Casablanca, connects cyberviolence targeting appearance to dominant aesthetic norms, but it is theoretical and rests on no sample. The mechanism is established in the region. Its scale is not. That absence of measurement is itself information : what is not counted is rarely treated as a problem.

Even so, the asymmetry does not dissolve by individual decision. A woman working in a profession where appearance is assessed cannot simply declare that comfort comes first. The balance of power is real. What can change is the clear-sightedness with which it is carried : telling apart what you wear because the context demands it from what you wear out of a habit nobody has examined.

There is a logic to clothing surfacing in an issue given over to inhabiting. A garment is the smallest space we occupy, and the only one we do not leave behind when we leave the house. You can be cramped inside it for a whole life without ever naming the discomfort.

Comfort does not need a discourse on wellbeing to justify it. Simple facts do the work : at 47 degrees, a fabric that lets air circulate makes a measurable difference, and a belt pulled too tight produces effects an instrument records. These facts prescribe no wardrobe. They only put the body back among the legitimate parties to a decision about dress, on the same footing as the gaze of others.

What remains is this. The same women, in Tunisia and Morocco, make up the overwhelming majority of the garment workshop workforce and the clientele of the second-hand markets. The clothing they make and the clothing they can afford almost never meet. That, more than the choice of a cut, may be where the question is settled.

B. Zine EzZine

The Sultane view