clothes make the man

You can judge a man's character based on his clothing and appearance. I'm not surprised John was fired for cause—he never dressed professionally, and the clothes make the man. You really need to get some better work clothes before starting this new job. The clothes make the man, you know

Prov. People will judge you according to the way you dress. Jim was always careful about how he dressed. He believed that clothes make the man.

People say clothes make the man to mean that dressing well helps people to be successful. The lawyer was wearing a stylish blue suit. Clothes make the man, Wade thought.

Outer appearances are very important. The thought appears in ancient Babylonian writings, and Erasmus’s collection of adages (1523) refers to the fact that the statement “Clothes are the man” appeared in Homer and numerous ancient Latin sources. In sixteenth-century England it was usually put as “apparel” rather than “clothes”; Shakespeare’s Polonius pontificates, “The apparel oft proclaims the man” (Hamlet, 1.3). It was a cliché by the nineteenth century.