I did an inventory of my wardrobe last month, mostly to work out why laundry day had started to feel like a rerun. Eleven black t-shirts. Four black button-downs. Two pairs of black trousers. One navy shirt I’ve never worn.

I live in Bangkok. It’s thirty-four degrees most days and the air has a texture to it. Black is a genuinely poor choice here, and I keep making it anyway.

The popular explanation for people like me is that we’re cultivating something. Mystery. Edge. A vague suggestion that we might be in a band. The real reason, for most of us, is duller than that and considerably more useful.

The mystery theory doesn’t survive contact with the research

Here’s the awkward part. If part of the appeal is seeming approachable, black may be working against you.

The psychologist Aldert Vrij ran two experiments in the nineties where he changed only one variable: whether the person in a crime scenario wore black or light clothing. Observers rated the ones in black as more aggressive. Same person, same behaviour, different shirt.

It shows up in uniforms too. A study of 737 citizens rating four police uniform colour schemes found the all-black kit came out worst on six of seven measures. Light blue shirt with navy trousers scored best on all seven.

So the intimidation effect is real. It’s just that nearly nobody I know chose black for it. They stumbled into it and stayed. The intimidation came along for free, uninvited.

What we’re buying is one fewer decision

Michael Lewis spent months shadowing Barack Obama for a 2012 profile, and one of the small things he came back with was how the man dressed. Grey suits or blue suits, nothing else. Obama’s explanation was that he was trying to reduce the number of choices he had to make, because he had a great many other things to decide that day.

Call it arithmetic. He was rationing a limited resource, and clothes were the cheapest place to cut.

You have some finite amount of patience for choosing things each day, and it goes down as you spend it. Deciding what to wear at seven in the morning isn’t free. It costs a little, and then it costs you again when you second-guess it in the lift.

A uniform is a decision you make once, properly, and then never make again. I made mine sometime around my second London winter, largely by accident, and I’ve never seriously revisited it.

Nobody is studying your shirt

This is the part that changed how I think about it.

In 2000, Thomas Gilovich and two colleagues published a set of studies on what they called the spotlight effect. Students were handed a t-shirt with an embarrassing photo on it and sent into a room of strangers. Then they were asked how many people would be able to say what was on the shirt. They guessed a bit under half. Roughly a quarter could.

We are all running a very detailed film about ourselves, and everyone else is running a very detailed film about themselves, and the overlap is smaller than anybody expects. The person you’re worried about noticing your shirt is worried about their own.

Once you believe that, the whole exercise of dressing to be perceived loses most of its urgency, because the audience you were rehearsing for was mostly hypothetical.

The wardrobe can also be a hiding place

I want to be honest about the other version of this, because I’ve been in it.

There’s a difference between “I don’t want my clothes to be the thing people look at” and “I don’t want people to look at me.” The first is efficiency. The second is avoidance, borrowing efficiency’s clothes.

Here’s a test I use on myself: imagine walking into a room in a bright colour. If the feeling is mildly silly, that’s fine. If it’s exposed, that’s worth listening to.

How to build a uniform without turning into a cliché

If you’ve read this far and recognised yourself, a few things that have worked:

Count what you own before you decide anything, not what you think you own. The number is usually a surprise and it tells you what you already reach for.

Cap it at two or three colours and buy multiples of the things you genuinely wear. Lean on texture rather than colour for variety, linen, knit, heavier cotton. Identical items aren’t boring, they’re maintenance.

Keep one thing that isn’t black. Weddings exist. So do dinners where you’d like to make an effort, and days you simply want to.

Set a replacement date rather than waiting for a hole. The failure mode isn’t looking severe, it’s looking tired, the specific grey-at-the-shoulders tired that turns up after forty washes.

What the free space is for

There’s a strand of research on what psychologists call enclothed cognition, the idea that clothes shape how the wearer thinks, not just how they’re read. The original lab coat experiments have had a rough time in replication, so I wouldn’t build a personality on them. But the softer version holds up in ordinary life: wear something you don’t have to think about, and you have more attention left for what you’re doing.

That’s the payoff: less spent deciding what to wear, more left for the day itself.

Last week I bought a green shirt. Properly green, the sort you can’t pretend was an accident. I’ve worn it twice, both times on purpose, and both times someone mentioned it. That’s the quiet benefit of a wardrobe that mostly recedes. When one thing doesn’t, it gets to mean something.