Workers Unite: Dress To The Nines
All through college, we wore the same thing every day: Indian cotton shirts and bell-bottom jeans. As the ‘70s wore on, the unisex uniformity palled on me. I began to dream of pink marabou feathers and silver lame and red taffeta and white voile (whatever voile is).
So imagine my chagrin, once I finally got in a position to afford a decent set of marabou feathers, to find the nation once again swept up in dressing down.
We’re expected to be tastefully tasteless, hanging loose at the office on Casual Day in our J. Crew-Gap-Banana Republic uniforms.
We’re expected to be infused with feelings of equality and collegiality.
We’re expected to engage in what management experts call “a ritual of relaxation.”
If you actually relax, as your body likes to do once it gets into weekend clothes, it could get dicey. Before you know it, you’ll be lulled by the sociable blur of plaid and khaki into telling your boss about the time you used his name to get Springsteen tickets.
Office politics in a faux-democracy where bosses dress like mail clerks is even more treacherous.
Many women who have struggled to rise in the corporate ranks feel a loss of power and control when they switch to informal clothes and come to work indistinguishable from their secretaries. They worry they are not yet as deft as men at conveying authority merely through speech patterns and body language.
Men have gotten so confused that GQ has devoted its January issue to helping them “ramp up” to the weekend, enumerating a list of casual-Friday crimes:
No denim shirts. Too ordinary and, frankly, too thirtysomething.
No logo T-shirts, no jeans, no sneakers.
No baseball caps. You are not David Geffen or Steven Spielberg.
No hiking boots you’ve actually hiked in.
No shorts. We don’t care what kind of legs you have - exposing your hairy, bare, knobby knees to co-workers violates OSHA guidelines.
No holes, tears or tatters, and no stains or dirt of any kind.
What has the Free World come to when professionals have to be instructed not to wear dirty clothes to the office?
The London Evening Standard lamented that a white-collar executive who affects the look of a blue-collar worker is merely a “slobboman.”
But the trend has spread from IBM to the White House, where Bill Clinton has instituted the first dress-down presidency. (The cardigan era of Jimmy Carter now looks positively Armani.)
Newark, N.J.’s business administrator, Glenn Grant, got so disgusted at seeing a large expanse of employee skin - bulging out of ripped jeans and tank tops - that he recently called a halt to dress-down Fridays.
The rest of the country should follow suit. In honor of New Year’s Eve, I would like to propose that we do away with dress-down day and replace it with dress-up day.
As Baudelaire wrote in his essay “In Praise of Cosmetics,” external finery is “one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul.”
Every Friday would be Formal Day. Men could wear black tie, velvet smoking jackets, ascots, riding breeches, bespoke suits, three-ply cashmere blazers and 300-thread-count Egyptian cotton shirts.
Women could wear, as they used to say in old Sears catalogues, “glamorous dress-up frocks with quality fabric and finish that flatter all figures.”
At 4 p.m. would be high tea, with Vivaldi and watercress sandwiches with the crusts cut off. At 6, there would be a cocktail party with Chet Baker on the CD and Oregon chardonnays.
We could all debate the Emma Thompson-Kenneth Branagh split, deciding if we are “Emma people” or “Ken people,” and talk about how we are “re-reading” Jane Austen.
Instead of letting down your guard, as you are wont to do in khakis, you could wave your cigarette holder and put down your rival with a biting Noel Coward line: “You’re a vile-tempered, loose-living, wicked little beast, and I never want to see you again so long as I live,” or “You’re nothing but a rampaging gas bag.”
It’s a dandy idea, because if we’re going to have sartorial conniptions, we may as well look good doing it. It’s all about illusions, anyhow. The faux-aristocracy of rentals matches the faux-democracy of the Gap in illustrating that central fact of American life: Appearances matter.
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