Vocal Point: Shopping for casual fashion takes professional abilities
I just want a new pair of pants. Is that asking too much from the Spokane fashion world?
With my employer’s increased emphasis on a more professional work attire, I found my collection of sweatshirts, tab collared shirts, and jeans, faded to every possible blue permeation (most men, like me, know black jeans are reserved for the great Johnny Cash or Roy Orbison, and if you can’t sing like them, don’t emulate their wardrobe) suddenly inappropriate. I’m not sure whether my Members Only jacket is in or out. If what must be the bands Quicksilver and Mossimo, commemorated on my T-shirts, are still playing or not, I haven’t heard any of their hits lately.
You’re on shaky sartorial ground if, when standing in front of your clothes closet wondering what to wear that day, the professional attire you’re emulating is a landscape professional. If you work in an office, and dress as if every day is jeans Friday, you’re on a slippery slope headed to a clothing intervention by your manager, usually in the form of an annual performance review.
When the intervention happens, and one is called into a private consultation with his/her manager, it’s best to have your ducks in a row … easily done on the Ducks Unlimited sweatshirt you likely wore to the review. Come up with a good reason to justify your appearance. For example:
Employer: “Business casual is the minimum dress standard here.”
Don: “When I was at Itron, we got to wear shorts on any work day. A look at Itron’s current stock prices shows a direct correlation of when a man’s hemline goes up, profits go up.”
Employer: “Don, we’re a nonprofit.”
Don: (Still thinking of a snappy comeback).
That lack of a snappy comeback had me browsing the counters of the mall department stores and perusing glossy circulars with the purpose of a wardrobe update. The first thing you notice when shopping in the men’s department is there’s a whole new world of colors out there. This is definitely confusing to a guy like me. In kindergarten, boys get comfortable with that little Crayola box. Paint, clothing, automobiles – we spend rest of our lives in that eight-color comfort zone.
Girls, however, grab that big Crayola pack of 64 colors and go wild, creating a male dependency right from the get go. Men grow up and marry, not for family and children, but to have someone to hold their hand in a department store world of taupe, sutter and burl. I’m not making those colors up … but someone did! Sutter? He’s a Hall of Fame baseball pitcher. Burl? The only burl I know was Ives, the folk singer.
There have been some great technological breakthroughs in my lifetime – penicillin, microcomputers, Teflon and Dockers. And then some genius started coating our Dockers with Teflon – a perfect synergy of technology and male table manners. Dockers were always a safe bet. But now, even the Dockers world is awash in color.
Everything is against the male when he goes clothes shopping – genetics (we’re hunters and gatherers, not cave designers), disposition (we’re missing some ballgame somewhere), and even the store lighting. What looks brown to a guy in the store somehow morphs into hunter green by the time we get it home into the closet. What’s up with that? Sales islands are confusing too. Most males, like sheep, dutifully obey the “line forms here” sign, but apparently those words are Greek to many others.
A friend suggested Garanimals on all male clothing but, speaking for all grown males, we would find that infantile and humiliating. However, with a little ingenuity, isn’t a better, more adult, system possible? Mate the clothing store with the hardware store. How about if all male clothing came with a bolt symbol, and all shirts came with an appropriate nut symbol, showing how it should be paired. Any self-respecting guy would know not to pair an SAE pair of pants with a metric shirt. Voila! It would mean a total end of plaid shirts combined with striped pants in today’s cubicles!
When “business casual” gets taken too far, it looks like “casual about business” to many employers, prompting their “call to action.” The bottom line is employers have the right to set the standards for dress in the workplace. At the end of the day, there’s no disputing that. However, clothing retail stores sure could make a man’s job of getting to the job properly attired much easier.