by Megan Hustad
Do be completely democratic in outlook. Candace Bushnell has the dumb, doomed, social-climbing blond of her novel Trading Up consistently treating “service people” like ugly furniture. Being rude to anyone paid to wait on you, of course, is an unmistakable sign you’ve got a tacky person on your hands. (Which is why novelists and screenwriters use this device so often.) But you see misguided ideas about how to treat so-called inferiors in the office as well, as when the guy who finally moves from his cubicle into an office tries to distance himself from old friends still on cubicle row, thinking it will help solidify his position on a higher rank. There are some books out there that will tell you this is the smart, strategic thing to do. It’s not. The number of people who reach the top of the ladder only to get knocked off and fall back to the bottom, and there get kicked by those they were rude to, neglectful of, or plain impatient with on their way up, are legion. (Michael Ovitz, Judith Regan, Leona Helmsley—just a few who made some mistakes in this regard.)
All that said, don’t make it a numbers game. When aspiring rapper Jamal Woodard, from Brooklyn, was scheduled for a promotional segment at radio station Hot 97 (he just signed with Warner Brothers), he showed up three hours early accompanied by a sizable entourage—about forty men, all dressed in extra-large blue T-shirts that read gravy on the front. Woodard was told to come back later, and so went and got a sandwich. When he returned, he was shot in the left buttock by someone in the crowd outside. He went ahead with the interview anyhow (as he’d decided that “I was standing downstairs—got shot in the ass” was not a legitimate excuse), and later, sobered by the experience, but still optimistic, he tried to see it as a welcome life lesson: “There’s no reason you should be up at Hot 97, thirty or forty deep, with shirts on. You try to show your movement—‘Wow, he got a lot of support’—but sometimes, you know what? The movement can hurt you. So many dudes cause problems. My motto now is: Four or five deep, I’m good. Four or five dudes, plus security.”30 He’s absolutely right: four or five deep is a good Master Mind starting point. Any more than that early on in your career, and you’ll—at the very least—get branded an innocuous social butterfly.
Do start to worry if you notice that none of your friends ever critique you.
Harry A. Overstreet used to tell his students to look for a companion “who is willing to risk his friendship by telling, you just how disagreeable or nonsensical or pathetic you are!” If you had obnoxious habits and no one pointed this out to you, chances are you’d never get rid of those habits. That said, if you find yourself with a friend who likes punishing people for their mistakes a little too much, or is a little too focused on how people perpetually disappoint, you might want to insert some emotional distance. (See chapter 2 if you don’t understand why.)
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I never would have thought that the same kind of Hail Mary maneuvers that brought Hill to the doorstep of powerful people still happen. They do. Here’s one contemporary example, told in Think and Grow Rich-style. A young San Francisco bookstore clerk wanted a publishing job on the opposite coast but had no idea how to go about it. One gray day she pored over the acknowledgments page in the back of a novel she liked—it was by A. M. Homes—and sat down to write to everyone connected to the publisher, HarperCollins. She didn’t realize this at the time, but one of her correspondents turned out to be the CEO of HarperCollins. Most improbably, this CEO (not someone with a lot of time on her hands) wrote back to thank her for her interest and wish her the best of luck. No immediate job offer, but step one. Step two was moving to New York, steps three through five included using her bookstore experience to land a job, then a promotion, then another one. Along the way, friendships were formed, phone calls made on her behalf, and she’d tell this story—about her far-fetched goals when she was working retail, about that improbable note—that made it clear just how serious and devoted she was.
This former bookstore clerk is now the associate director of publicity at a major publishing house and making close to six figures. (Hill liked to include salaries in his roundups.) It’s a cold, cold universe indeed, but sometimes worthy people get what they have coming, and you sense yourself warm up a bit.
6
Checking Yourself
at the Door
* * *
What Brooks Brothers and Midcentury
Handwringing over Bland Conformity
Reveal About Personal Style
A good plain look is my favorite look. If I didn’t
want to look so “bad,” I would want to look “plain.”
That would be my next choice. —ANDY WARHOL
WHATEVER SYMPATHY I had for the idea of clothes as a valuable form of self-expression disappeared one afternoon late in 1997, when I sat down for a job interview wearing a jacket that cost $14.99. Up to that instant, I had been an adventurous dresser. If you were to break into my apartment, you’d find a photograph of me in East Berlin in 1996, wearing black tights, short tweed skirt, chunky black shoes with big silver buckles, large-collared baby blue men’s shirt, and dark green vintage men’s shirt over that—a $2.99 jacket —with granny barrettes in hair that was short, dyed black, and curled in a way I sincerely believed made me look like silent film star Gloria Swanson, only indie rock. There were many more outfits like this, though I toned it way down for the interview. But as my interviewer scrutinized me while I fielded his questions that afternoon, staring at my gray synthetic blend much as one watches someone trying to parallel park in a space that’s, clearly too small, I realized the idea of “being yourself” through distinctive dress was perhaps not so smart.
More recently, when I walk anywhere downtown at 6:30 p.m. on a weekday, amid a sea of men ages twenty-two to forty-five, standing at happy-hour bars and all dressed in blue button-downs and khakis, it strikes me that “business casual” is not the liberating force it was cracked up to be. Men are still in uniform, just as they were in the days when suits were required. Then I imagine Cary Grant in North by Northwest dodging crop-dusters in a blue button-down and khakis, and I feel something significant has been lost.
Looking back on that interview outfit now, I see that sacrificing my chance at getting my foot in the door because it was important for my outside to match my inside was not a particularly useful form of integrity. The guy who interviewed me wore a rumpled shirt that looked like he’d slept in it, he smelled of smoke, his whole office smelled of smoke, and there was a cardboard cutout of Austin Powers propped up in the corner. This was not an extravagantly formal workplace, in other words. But after I left he called the placement agency to complain that they’d sent over some kid who couldn’t be bothered to put on a suit. My problem wasn’t that I was unaware of the strictures of corporate life—my local Laundromat had one piece of decoration on the wall, and it was a sign informing clothes washers that
EMPLOYERS NOTICE AN APPLICANT’S SHOES—but it Was Very difficult to imagine walking into Brooks Brothers and not feeling like a stooge. While I was resigned to working all day for a large corporation, and a thirty-minute commute on public transportation each way, somehow wearing a different outfit than I’d normally wear, that struck me as just too much.
According to the logic of Dress for Successy the 1975 bible of ambitious wardrobe, what I’d done with the $14.99 jacket was “precondition” the company environment to reject me. Preju-dices based on clothing choices were widespread, the author John T. Molloy stated, and most people were pretty comfortable with having them. Molloy first started thinking about wardrobe considerations in the late 1950s, when he was a bored English teacher at a Connecticut prep school. One day he noticed something so ordinary that he’d never thought to think twice about it before—namely, that men’s raincoats came in two standard colors, black and beige. Before long he concocted a theory: the color of a man’s raincoat was an indicator of his class status. Beige coats meant upper-middle-class, while black raincoats typically signaled lower-middle-class. Molloy decided to submit this idea to experiment. First,
he went to fancy Fifth Avenue stores in New York and counted the coats on the racks—four to one in favor of beige. In more low-budget stores downtown he found the reverse distribution, far more black than beige. For phase two of his clinical studies, he sent interns out on rainy days to stand at subway entrances in different neighborhoods and note coat colors (an experiment he later repeated in Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta). Still later, he showed 1,362 test subjects two photos of a clean-cut, expensively but not extravagantly dressed man. The photos were identical in every way except for the color of the man’s raincoat. Molloy asked each test subject to choose which man looked more successful. Eighty-two percent picked the man in beige.
Then Molloy’s attention turned to the necktie. While working the counter at one of those fancy Fifth Avenue stores one day (he’d left his teaching job to focus on menswear), he was the victim of an armed robbery. Down at the precinct station, the cops handed him the book of mug shots, and Molloy couldn’t help but notice that in thousands of photos—not a single tie. His first thought was that thugs might want to start wearing them because cops clearly weren’t accustomed to arresting men in ties. His second thought was that ties might speak as loudly as raincoats did, so he took to the streets again. At both Grand Central Terminal and the Port Authority bus station, he stood around in the middle of evening rush-hour foot traffic and tried to appear anxious. Then he went up to people and said he’d forgotten his wallet and could they spare seventy-five cents to help him get home? For the first hour, he wore no tie; for the second hour, he did. During hour one, he was given $7.23; during hour two, the hour of the tie, he pulled in an even $26.00. The average American’s reaction to clothes, he decided, was like Pavlov’s dogs to the ring of a bell.31 Beige raincoats rang better bells than black ones, and neckties made a cha-ching noise, like a cash register.
After compiling his research—he claimed Dress for Success encompassed “the opinions and subconscious reactions” of over fifteen thousand business people—Molloy felt confident in saying he could engineer a wardrobe to “elicit just about any desired effect.” The smart man would let hard research, not the dictates of fashion or personal taste, choose his clothing. Some social groups preferred navy blue solids, others responded better to gray and stripes, and depending on whom you wanted to cozy up to, you’d simply pick one over another. Molloy desperately wanted people to understand that the correct way to think about clothes was as a means to a socioeconomic end only, and beyond that, fashion wasn’t worth thinking much about. By far the best choice for anyone who hoped to do well financially was to dress upper-middle-class. “I will never ask you to concede that it is fair or just or moral for a man’s success or failure to depend, to a large extent, on how he dresses,” he wrote in his introduction. “But that is very much the way the money-oriented sectors of our culture work; and it is my contention that in matters of individual striving, it is far more rewarding to let reality be your guide, to use the system rather than ignore or flout it.”
By “money-oriented sectors” I don’t think he meant banking exclusively, but any arena outside academia. The thrust of
Molloy’s argument, as well as that of other midcentury minds obsessed with the same questions, was that there were things clothes did well, and things clothes didn’t do well at all. While everyone else wrung their hands about how bad, how very sad, it was that all America was conforming, these thinkers started toying with the notion that blending in actually has its advantages. Indeed, it has a kind of subversive power. It seemed very relevant the other day when I overheard a gruff man, leaning in close over the cafe table to say to his lunch partner, “I’ve come to talk serious. You understand me? I’ve come to talk serious.” He probably wouldn’t have to say that, I thought, if he weren’t wearing a Charlie Brown T-shirt.
All discussion of dressing for business starts with the suit. Horatio Alger’s street urchins often received suits as gifts, because a suit was a gift that kept on giving. Once suited up, these poor boys could stride safely into glittering hotel lobbies and banks and other places they would have been kicked out of before. When the titular heroine of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, destitute and new to Chicago, gets two, soft ten-dollar bills pressed into her hand, it’s clear what she needs to do—she needs to buy “a nice new jacket.” F. Scott Fitzgerald used a man’s lack of a suit as shorthand for his failures as a provider, even as a lover. Says The Great Gatsby’s Myrtle Wilson of her cuckolded husband: “The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it.”
By the mid-1940s, or after World War II, one school of thought maintained that the best way to get a job was to look like you didn’t need one. The perfect interview outfit would have you looking neither too underdressed (like you’d recently left the breadlines) nor too overdressed (which also made you look desperate, just in a different way). When the hero of Frederic Wakeman’s 1946 novel The Hucksters gets dressed for an interview at an advertising agency, he goes through this thought process: “white unhollywood-looking shirt, of course”; then a plain black tie (nothing too loud); “and finally the shoes he’d bought in London. Those shoes were the goddamnedest sincerest looking shoes in all of New York.” That was key—businesslike, upper-crust, almost insistently earnest.
Brooks Brothers was the most popular purveyor of the goddamned sincere look, having been around since before the Civil War.32 They opened for business when all suits were custom-made, but had been pioneers in off-the-rack, which brought business attire to a wider but still largely well-to-do clientele. “Many grown men would feel uncouth if they ever had to appear in public without their Brooks Brothers suit,” the pop sociologist Vance Packard wrote in 1959’s The Status Seekers, noting a thriving business in secondhand “snob-label” clothing—Brooks Brothers, Burberry, and J. Press—for those men who couldn’t afford to buy new every time. Mary McCarthy’s 1942 short story “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” played with the idea that the Brooks Brothers monogram signified someone with feet firmly on the ladder, at or nearing the top. The man of the title was a steel company exec; he meets an antsy young woman in a Pullman car. She’s got bohemian socialist leanings and assumes he’s a neutered, conformist fool, but, several whiskies later, ends up sleeping with him anyway. A few years after this story was published, Brooks Brothers decided to ride McCarthy’s wave and “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit” ad campaign was born—cementing the look of the quintessential American success story (professional and maybe even sexual) in the popular imagination.^
Surrendering yourself to Brooks Brothers today is for some such a reminder of everything they hate about their country-club fathers that they’re tempted to say “Screw it” and wear a T-shirt with a marijuana leaf on it to work. Greg, a journalist, noticed a new intern in his office doing just that. “In fact, he wore it every day, the same shirt,” Greg said. How did it go over? “The boss figured that unless he was the next H. L. Mencken, he wasn’t getting a job.” Automatic disqualification, in other words, though it’s rarely stated so openly. “Entry-level, it’s harder, because the job doesn’t require you to dress up,” said Ben, who worked at an Internet start-up in the late 1990s and remembers young staffers coming to work in shorts and Reeboks. He realized this made for a less than ideal picture in more ways than one, and yet, barring pressure to do otherwise, it seemed harmless enough. For the young and underpaid, being able to wear whatever you want is a welcome compensation for the more onerous aspects of the job. (This is especially true among undergraduate Marxists forced into capitalism out of economic necessity—“The job I don’t like, but it’s pretty laid-back, so at least…”)
In the late 1960s, the Hollywood costume designer Edith Head made a foray into success literature with How to Dress for Success, in which she argued that this amounted to infantile narcissism, essentially. You thought you were special, and needed to communicate that uniquen
ess, but who were you really? She addresses herself to young single women in particular:
The you we’re talking about is not alone. She is manufactured by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands, in all sizes and shapes of women, all after success—in many cases, the same success you seek. And in this competitive race, it is frequently the best “packaging” that makes the difference between those who are left on the shelf and those who are sought after and snapped up fast in the well-stocked supermarket of modern life.
Head had won seven Academy Awards (out of thirty nominations), and her name would have been instantly recognizable to the young American women accustomed to sewing their own clothes—which was most of them. And though she was considered an artist in some circles, she was primarily interested in advancing a completely pragmatic, totally unfanciful understanding of fashion. What you wore had a certain power, sure, and you’d be foolish not to exploit it, but any girl smart enough to exploit that power also had to understand that her goals in life should come first. (And on this score she’s decidedly dis-inspirational: “There must be something you want more than anything else. Is it something that is possible for you to get? If not, get it off your mind and start again.” This is hardly you can be anything you set your mind to! rhetoric.) The difference between a young woman and a can of beans, Head claimed, is that the beans were going one place only. “You are going many places,” but even that was contingent on your ability to get over yourself, to be very clear on what your talents were and were not, and to put on some simple skirt suits and tailored dresses.
