There are things you fix without thinking about the fact that you're fixing them. You pull your shirt back down after you reach for something. Hook a finger into your underwear and move it back to wherever it started. Smooth the waistband before you sit. Move the seam. Pull the strap back up. Maybe you stand up and give everything that little tug that apparently became part of standing up at some point.
And none of this is particularly dramatic. In fact, you may have done three of these things since you started reading this. Which is kind of fascinating.
Because at some point you had to notice that the shirt needed pulling down. But you probably don't stand up anymore and think, Ah yes, time to perform the shirt maneuver. You just do it.
So how does something that was once annoying enough to fix become something we barely notice ourselves fixing? It turns out humans are exceptionally good at this. There is a useful idea in psychology called habit. And habit researchers don't simply mean something you do a lot.
When we repeatedly perform the same behavior in the same kind of context, associations can form between the context and our response. Eventually the context itself can help cue the behavior, so we don't necessarily have to make the same deliberate decision every time.
Which is incredibly useful. Imagine having to actively reason your way through brushing your teeth every morning. But now think about your clothes. You stand up, then you pull the shirt down. You sit, then you move the waistband. You walk, you adjust the underwear. And maybe after the five-hundredth time, these things stop registering as decisions at all. They just become part of what you do when you wear that particular thing.
There is probably something in your closet right now that comes with its own little set of instructions that nobody actually gave you. These are the pants that are great, but not if you're going to sit for a long time. This is the bra that is absolutely fine until approximately 6:17 p.m. This shirt is terrific, just don't raise your arms too high. These are the underwear you like, except for the thing they do when you walk.
You know the rules. And maybe you've known them for so long that you don't really think of them as rules anymore. Which brings us to something researchers in human factors actually study: the workaround.
Most of the research on workarounds involves people dealing with complicated systems and technology rather than underwear, which feels like a missed opportunity. But the idea is surprisingly useful here. When the system someone is using doesn't quite work for what they need to accomplish, people often develop another little behavior that allows them to keep going. They add a step. Skip a step. Move something. Remember something. Basically, humans figure it out.
And once you know that word, some of the things we do with our clothes start looking a little different. Because maybe the tug is a workaround. Or maybe knowing exactly where to move the waistband before you sit is a workaround. But maybe deciding that a perfectly good pair of underwear is only suitable for days when you won't be walking very far is a fairly elaborate workaround. And none of this means we are wandering around miserable in our clothes. That's almost the more interesting part. We just... figured it out.
This is something we think about a lot at TuKiss because, from a design perspective, the workaround is information. If you keep having to pull something down, move something over, smooth something out, or put something back where it started, your garment is telling us something too.
We are very good at figuring things out. We learn the weird shower knob at the hotel. We know exactly how hard you have to push the kitchen drawer before it closes. We know which charger only works if the cord bends slightly to the left. And after a while, you don't necessarily think this thing isn't working properly every time you use it. You just know how to use it.
So maybe that's what is happening with some of our clothes too. Maybe the fascinating bit isn't that your underwear moved and you moved it back. But rather that somewhere along the way, moving it back became your part of wearing the underwear. And once we started thinking about it that way, we couldn't stop seeing these tiny negotiations everywhere.
Because your body didn't do anything particularly remarkable. You sat down, you stood up, you reached for something, you walked across a room. And then you did the other little movement you've apparently attached to that movement.
To be clear, each movement is sort of a miracle in itself. The readjustment? That's the bit that we just can't stop noticing: Sit, then smooth. Stand, then tug. Walk, then adjust. You can see where this is going yes?
Which makes you wonder how many things we've gotten very good at doing for our clothes without ever realizing that we were doing them. And maybe that's the more revealing question. Not, "why have we tolerated this?" But,"when did we stop noticing that we were fixing it?"
Because some of the things we've learned to manage are things the garment could have been designed to manage instead. And this is probably the question underneath a lot of what we're doing at TuKiss. Can we design the garment to do more of the work so the woman wearing it does not have to? Can something look really good and feel really good and just... do its job?
That is THE goal.
And now, sorry, you're probably going to notice every single one of them.
Sources
Patterson, E. S. (2018). Workarounds to intended use of health information technology: a narrative review of the human factors engineering literature. Human factors, 60(3), 281-292.
Wood, W., & Rünger, D. (2016). Psychology of habit. Annual review of psychology, 67(1), 289-314.