Friday, January 20, 2012

Dress for success...

I will begin this by saying that I enjoy dressing up and looking nice. In fact, I think it would be nice if people took a little bit of extra time to look nice, instead of "cool". Sure, I wear blue jeans and t-shirts as much as the next person, but I still appreciate the early part of the last century where everyone - literally everyone - dressed up at all times. Men wore suits in every situation and women wore dresses.
I want people to be comfortable, and I'm not going to tell anyone what to wear, but a sharp three-piece suit and a fedora looks a lot nicer than a pair of skinny jeans and a flannel. Hell, even middle class and poor people back in the day wore suits; they may have been lower quality materials, but they still wore them nonetheless.
With that being said, I cannot figure out this need in the modern workplace to dress up. Sure, if you meet with clients all day long, or work in customer service in general, I can understand the company wanting you to look professional. However, when I work in a cubicle all day long seeing no clients, and our office in general recieves visitors only few and far between, I cannot understand the need to wear slacks, a shirt and a tie.
I was told once that I should "dress for the job I want, not the job I have". Alright, I get that. But it still doesn't explain why the job that I want requires me to dress up any more than I do in my current job. Couldn't the job I want just as easily be a job where I can wear jeans and a t-shirt, instead of dress pants and a button down?

3 comments:

Griffin said...

If you can find a dot.com company to work for before they go under, you can probably wear whatever you want, work 4 day weeks, intermingle yoga, and have the creative inspiration to spend half the day working on your own side projects. Oh wait - they do that at Virgin Mobile and Google...which is feasible when you are worth so much productivity doesn't present nearly as much of a cost as it does anywhere else.

Christine H. said...

It is generally true though that if you try to envision people you work with in higher positions, it's easier to envision those that dress well in those positions. A lot of it is subconscious.

That said, I wish we could go back to some of the fashion styles from the 40s. I love those loose trousers men wore.

Unknown said...

I'll tell you what, it would be nice to work for a company that is successful enough that they don't have to worry about what their employees are wearing.

Christine - what's interesting is that it seems like women's fashion through the middle part of the 20th century were pretty boring, whereas they were rather interesting before and since. However, men's fashions seemed to be at their height in the late 19th and early to mid 20th century, but have been boring since.