Red dress, black suit: Clothing color in first impression formation

Clothing color may influence first impressions by guiding visual attention and shaping attractiveness judgments and social meanings. Using red dress and black suit as focal cues, this study manipulated dress color (red versus blue) and suit color (black versus navy) across dyadic romantic scenes and single-person mockups. In a single experiment, 130 young heterosexual participants completed three sequential tasks assessing their eye-tracked visual attention, post-exposure interpersonal evaluation, and explicit social-meaning attribution. Eye-tracking findings showed that in dyadic scenes, women looked longer at the red than blue dress and fixated on it sooner, whereas men showed no corresponding red-blue difference. No significant dress-color effects were detected in the mockups. Direct cross-context analyses did not confirm that the effects differed reliably between the dyadic scene and mockup. Post-exposure ratings indicated that the woman was perceived as more attractive and the dyad as having stronger chemistry when she wore red rather than blue. Participants also associated the red dress with greater sexual attractiveness and stronger romantic signaling. The black-navy suit manipulation produced no reliable suit-color effects on visual attention, interpersonal evaluation, or formal-attire social meaning ratings under the present conditions.