The Dress Mess

In the long-ago days of the 50s, “casual dress” at the office meant light starch or a striped shirt for the men, dresses and skirts for women. The dress code may have been unwritten, but it was ironclad, a corporate subset of the natural selection law: Those who didn’t follow the code were followed out the front door by Security.

But after the great Boomer revolution of the 60s, employees began objecting to any rules, even the unwritten kind. Seizing on an opportunity to demonstrate benevolence at absolutely no cost, executives instituted Casual Dress Fridays. They knew their humble workers, having been disciplined in the arts of formal office wear, would shift naturally and smoothly to an upscale, preppy kind of casual look.

But a funny thing happened on the way to preppydom: It turns out that employees already knew what “casual” meant – it meant “comfortable”, what you put on when you watch TV at night or mow the lawn on Saturday. So casual became a lot casualler, and dressing down went a lot downer than managers had expected. Eventually, to avoid discrimination suits and daily mix-ups, what was good for Friday had to be made good for the rest of the week, and casual went full time. To top things off, the nerd-olution began to blossom, and companies sprang up under kids in jeans and T-shirts. Even worse, those teenage CEOs were making millions, so it was hard for corporate executives to speak solemnly about the negative impact poor dress had on business operations.

Now companies are in a bit of a clothes bind: how to put the casual genie back in its bottle when he wants to stay out and run around half-naked. Some issued subtle memos, like “Be a Casual Dresser, not a Dressing Casualty”. Others put up posters showing the parts of the anatomy that had to be covered. Naturally, the posters didn’t last long: the more explicit ones were pulled down and taken home; the less explicit were made more explicit by resident artists.

In despair (tempered with great relief), companies then covered the dress problem with a blanket of rules, which specified the appropriate inches and angles and locations along curves. The rules weren’t completely arbitrary, however. Executives encouraged employee input and got it. Workers spent hours browsing the Internet and perusing catalogues to make sure all areas were covered. This consumed a lot of time, but did result in a much greater worker involvement, especially among men, until the Victoria’s Secret site was declared off-limits.

Still, these were no more than holding actions, leaving unaddressed the most burning issue of all: Now that every day is casual dress day, should companies, for the sake of change, employee self-respect, and good alliteration institute Formal Fridays?