What the Jury Sees Before You Speak: The Fashion Psychology of Credibility, Authority, and Outcome

What the Jury Sees Before You Speak: The Fashion Psychology of Credibility, Authority, and Outcome

Before a witness speaks, before evidence is heard, jurors have already formed impressions from appearance. Those impressions are fast, automatic, and resistant to instruction. This program gives trial lawyers a formal framework for a variable they manage in every case without language for it.

Drawing on Estelle v. Williams, the enclothed cognition research, and social-perception studies on how observers judge competence and credibility, the session examines how clothing and embodied presence shape jury judgments across four documented dimensions: credibility, dominance, interpersonal warmth, and liability. It addresses both directions of the problem: how jurors read the person in front of them, and how what a witness or defendant wears affects their own regulation and presence under scrutiny.

Attorneys will leave with a working framework for assessing how a client or witness will be perceived, why conventional "dress conservatively" instructions can backfire, and how to prepare a witness to remain credible and coherent under cross-examination.

Speakers

Jennifer Heinen, MSc, Fashion Psychologist

Founder, STYLMND

New York, NY

Brian C. Brown, Esq.

Avanzino & Moreno, P.C.

Brooklyn, New York