  In our society and century, clothing is not anymore used only as a means for
body protection. Our paper builds upon the evidence, studied within the social
sciences, that clothing brings a clear communicative message in terms of social
signals, influencing the impression and behaviour of others towards a person.
In fact, clothing correlates with personality traits, both in terms of
self-assessment and assessments that unacquainted people give to an individual.
The consequences of these facts are important: the influence of clothing on the
decision making of individuals has been investigated in the literature, showing
that it represents a discriminative factor to differentiate among diverse
groups of people. Unfortunately, this has been observed after cumbersome and
expensive manual annotations, on very restricted populations, limiting the
scope of the resulting claims. With this position paper, we want to sketch the
main steps of the very first systematic analysis, driven by social signal
processing techniques, of the relationship between clothing and social signals,
both sent and perceived. Thanks to human parsing technologies, which exhibit
high robustness owing to deep learning architectures, we are now capable to
isolate visual patterns characterising a large types of garments. These
algorithms will be used to capture statistical relations on a large corpus of
evidence to confirm the sociological findings and to go beyond the state of the
art.
