If you were an adult or near adult in the early 1980s, chances are you heard of the Dress for Success books by John T. Molloy. They gave aspiring yuppies the knowledge of how to dress like wealthy business men and women.
The books are still around, used (Dress for Success and Women’s Dress for Success), and are horribly dated. However, the meta-information, the theory behind the details, is still sound. If you can ignore the fashion advice and follow the underlying principles, you can learn to dress to fit into any group of people.
I learned a lot from my copies of these books, and have had the idea, buried in the back of my mind, to use the theories to create an “Aspie Gal’s Guide to Clothing”. Probably won’t ever happen, as I have more important projects and besides, clothing just doesn’t interest me that much.
John Molloy (who I am half convinced is Aspie too) wrote another Success book that was much less popular, Molloy’s Live for Success. To explain what this book is about, I’m quoting the top review on Amazon:
… how people react to you differently depending on what you wear, they also react to you on how you talk (and not just on WHAT you say, but more HOW you say it), how you hold your shoulders, your mouth, and other behavioral mechanisms. Molloy runs through all of this, explaining the experiments he did and the results. …. In one chapter, Molloy explains how he used his research to help an employee eliminate a series of body language oddities which were making people dislike him. Furthermore, he had passed these body language habits onto his kids who were unpopular in school. They all learned what they were doing and corrected it, with enormous success.
Sounds like a guide to social skills for Aspergers adults!
My copy went missing about 10 years ago, but I’m cleaning house and hope to find it. When I do, I’ll start publishing lots of excerpts — not enough to violate copyright, but enough to discuss the basic principles and give my take on applying them.
How did the employee fix his body language? He set up a video camera in his dining room, and turned it on when his family ate dinner. By watching the tapes (this was in the 1970s or 1980s), he and his kids were able to see their body language and work to modify it.
