The Old-School Way Uniformly Better

It’s back to school time. Even for those of us who’ve been out of school for decades, it’s still a shape-up-and-get-it-together season. Time to engage in the age old rituals: stock up on supplies, spiff up the fall wardrobe. In stores all over the country you can see mothers outfitting their children for the rigors of scholarship, more and more of them, both at private and public schools, getting fitted for school uniforms. Neatly dressed kids make for nicely behaved kids, the studies show. So could someone please explain why adults are ignoring that evidence and “dressing down” for work these days?

In a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management this year, 87 percent of companies questioned answered that their employees dress casually at least once a week; for nearly half, it’s every day. Another human resources survey placed casual dress as the most popular employee perk - it ranked higher than on-site child care or flexible schedules. What’s wrong with these people?

Wearing a shirt instead of a suit is more important than being able to drop in on your toddler at lunchtime or arranging your schedule to take your mother to the doctor?

A little truth in packaging here - Cokie wore school uniforms for 12 years and misses them to this day. Oh, of course they were odious at the time. But this business of having to wear something different and having to figure it out every day takes up too much time. And many of the men “benefiting” from dressing down share those complaints. It’s so much easier just to put on the suit, shirt and tie, not to mention cheaper.

Now a suit is not only passe, it’s suspect. A guy shows up in a suit and everyone thinks he has a job interview or a social engagement. It used to be the most anonymous attire, now it invites investigation. One friend told us of bankers visiting a client Internet company and causing a panic. When the workers saw the suits they assumed a buyout was in the works. A young lawyer friend left his firm in Washington to join one specializing in high tech in San Francisco. He bought an expensive suit for the new venture and showed up in an office full of people in sport shirts. Which one was the hick? For people in the service industries it’s a constant dilemma, do I wear a suit to show authority or do I dress down to show I’m with it?

The other burning question: How far down can you go in dressing down? Companies now issue handbooks showing what’s OK, what’s not and offer handy tips like “Dress for a Saturday night date but not a bowling date.” One published no-no list tells women not to wear Spandex pants, biking shorts, halter tops or see-through blouses. Men should stay away from high-water pants, tank tops and sweatpants. That’s a relief. A newspaper report on casual dress tells of one company establishing a standards committee that handed down an edict requiring “foundation garments.” They needed to require people to wear underwear to work?

Sticking with suits is sure simpler. And what about those surveys showing that schoolchildren do better on tests, are absent less often and better disciplined when they wear uniforms? Any reason to believe the same wouldn’t be true for adults? No, according to a poll of 1,000 companies conducted by a New York-based employment law firm. In it, nearly half of employers said they had noticed that casual dress led to casual attitudes about showing up at work and 30 percent detected more flirting going on. (Maybe more of them need to institute the underwear rule.)

With any luck, this is one of those stupid fads that will die out soon. Otherwise, we’re likely to see people coming to work looking like the tourists who wander through the Capitol Building in Washington in terrycloth short shorts and halter tops. Then the pendulum could swing so far that companies might start requiring uniforms, the way they now insist on drug tests. How we’d yell and scream, and what a relief it would be! For now, we’ll keep looking enviously at those well-behaved children heading back to school in their nicely pressed uniforms.