The proverb holds that appearance counts: how a person is dressed influences how they are perceived, trusted or treated, regardless of what they are actually like underneath. It is used both as practical advice, to dress well if you want to be taken seriously, and as a wry comment on how shallow that judgement can be, since fine clothes can make a fool look respectable and a worthy person in shabby dress can be overlooked.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘clothes maketh the man’?
The saying’s roots go back to classical rhetoric before it became an English proverb. The Dutch scholar Erasmus recorded a Latin version, “vestis virum facit” (“clothes makes the man”), in his great collection of sayings, the Adagia, at entry 3.1.60. Within that same entry Erasmus linked the saying to the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, whose Institutio Oratoria argued that dressing correctly and with an air gives a man authority, “as the Greek line testifies”. Quintilian wrote in Latin, and the reference to a Greek line shows how old the underlying idea already was by the time Erasmus wrote it down.
The thought reached English prose by the fifteenth century. Peter Idley’s Instructions to his Son contains an early English version of the idea, dated by one source to 1443 and more commonly given elsewhere as around 1445 to 1450, so there is some disagreement over the precise year.
The phrase is very often credited to Mark Twain, but that attribution is mistaken. Twain did write a line on the subject, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society,” but it only appeared in More Maxims of Mark, a collection edited by Merle Johnson and published in 1927, well after his death and centuries after Erasmus and the medieval English versions had already established the saying. Twain’s memorable one-liner has simply overshadowed a proverb with a much longer history behind it.