I’ve long wondered how personality influences clothing and decor choices.

Wait.

When you put it like that, OF COURSE one’s personality influences one’s choices of clothing and home decor.

Someone who wears a fedora is absolutely not the same type of person as a person wearing a backwards baseball cap. There is a vast difference between the type of person who pastes a collage on her bathroom wall and the type of person who can’t sleep knowing that there is a crumb on her kitchen floor.

One of my defunct blogs was formed entirely on that premise–that if you wear clothes, you have a style. It may not be a considered style, or a polished style, but it’s a style nonetheless.

They say that intelligent people (or creative people, depends on the story) always have a messy office, although this sounds to me like flattery to make people with messy offices feel smart or creative.

But I do wonder if playful, maximalist designers like Kelly Wearstler or Christian Lacroix are more Intuitive.

Or if a more simple look that’s cozy, like an Emily Henderson design, is indicative of a Sensing type.

Or if someone like Dior–very structured and considered–was a Thinking type.

It’s hard to imagine any of these designers producing work in each other’s style. The lines are different, the priorities are different. The overall effect is different.

Now, I’m sure a competent designer could emulate another style (and many interior designers do, because they often design for the client rather than just their own whims) but a unique, ahem, point of view is one of the necessary criteria for a good designer.

I’m just guessing here, but I doubt that someone like Alexander McQueen (romantic and all about that grand narrative) is anything someone like Karl Lagerfeld (quite precise), even though both share a tendency toward subversion.

I might explore more of this. Design is something I enjoy (both structurally and aesthetically) and I haven’t talked about it on this blog as much as I would have thought.

Design + personality sounds like it would be fun to write about, even if not 100% useful.

But that’s okay. We all need a little more fun in our lives.

 

More perhapses

  • Perhaps a Perceiver is less organized than a Judger, unless of course the Perceiver overcorrects.
  • Perhaps an Introvert is more likely to include a reading nook than the large dining table for the Extravert.
  • Perhaps an Intuitive is more likely to find things that “go” but don’t “match” while a Sensing person would take the time to find the exact right match.