by Megan Hustad
It’s precisely this blend-into-the-woodwork, lost-in-the-supermarket sensibility that many beginning office workers seek to avoid, though it’s often at their own peril. Mikhail, who works in corporate law in Seattle, used to draw on his entire wardrobe of vintage cowboy shirts when getting dressed for work. “I had a… well, let’s say my hair was different, too,” he said. (I’ve seen pictures—it was very curly and very high.) “I figured they’d let it go because I was European.” He knew his look stood out, and would occasionally suffer subtle hints from colleagues that he might want to tone it down a little, but otherwise didn’t think much about it. Then, after a long holiday weekend, when half the office had clearly been at the beach and the other half had gone shopping, he joined the gaggle by the water cooler and complimented his neighbor on his new pants. “Thanks,” the neighbor said, “but y’know, they’re not nearly as nice as your turquoise pants.” At which point Mikhail had to accept that his more buttoned-down colleagues were driven to distraction by the way he dressed—they could not, would not, let it go. He then also had to come to terms with the fact that he was surrounded by people for whom “Oh, you’re so creative!” was not, in fact, a compliment. They meant it as: I kinda see what you’re trying to do here, but I don ’t quite understand it} and I’m not sure I like it because it seems like there might be some implicit judgment of me [and my more conventional ways] in there.
Edith Head, for all her grumpiness, foresaw these situations and tried to tie the idea of dressing appropriately for work to a new development in film costuming. In years past, she said, movie stars wanted to look glamorous all the time, and might turn down a role if the script didn’t contain enough costume changes or incorporate enough clothing that communicated “movie star.” So a director would cast Carole Lombard as a poor secretary, and she’d be filmed coming to work in a sable and pearls. But now the studios, having figured out that “fitness for the occasion” made an actor’s performance more believable, were demanding greater authenticity in costume design. Head apparently believed this was a foreign enough concept because she tells a story to illustrate: When asked to outfit Natalie Wood for a role as a sales clerk in Macy’s pet department, Head and her staff actually decided to go to Macy’s and have a look around. Then they sewed up a smock for Wood that was very similar to the smocks Macy’s pet department employees wore in real life. This was exciting, Head said, and was becoming all the rage, because it helped cement what she called the “acceptance look.”
Head said she had no problem with a girl “taking the chance of being classed with the weird ones, including the town drunk and the village idiot,” as some committed nonconformists did. But one couldn’t do this and then object when the more conventional ones took you up on the offer. Until you proved your worth to the company, you weren’t free to dress as you pleased. If you were content to remain “a carefree little file clerk whom nobody sees,” she continued, by all means wear whatever you wanted—just know that the company would probably relegate you and your wardrobe to supporting roles. If you wanted to be out front calling the shots, you’d wear clothes that sent signals that you expected—indeed demanded—to be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, this meant no off-days. You could not, as a friend of mine once did, operate on the assumption that a pair of sweatpants two days a week would be canceled out by his blazers and ties the other three days of the week. (He’s now a freelancer.) Or that you could only bother to look sharp on days you had a big meeting, or knew you’d be bumping into someone you needed to impress. For one thing, it ignored the power of gossip. If you had a widespread reputation for rayon, or for putting your makeup on in the elevator, the first thing a new person introduced to you might think—that is, on that rare occasion you didn’t show up at the office with wet hair—is not “Wow, she looks great,” but “You know, she doesn’t look that skanky after all.”
In the summer of 2005, a company-wide memo sent out by higher-ups at Fairchild Publications, the publisher of Women’s Wear Daily and Beauty Biz Report, was leaked to the Internet. The memo was a “friendly reminder” about their business-casual dress code, and was addressed to the magazine empire’s youngest members:
As an intern embarking on your professional career it is important to remember that your dress speaks volumes about you. Fairchild understands you want to express your fash-ionista style; however, showing up in a strappy tank top, short blue jean skirt and flip flops is not going to express that you are a smart professional looking to succeed in the magazine industry. Business casual is crisp, neat and should look appropriate even for a chance meeting with a CEO. It should not look like cocktail or picnic attire.
It went on to specify that skirts should cover one’s thighs while seated, that slits facilitate walking, not a view of one’s legs, and that cleavage was “not appropriate to business and job search occasions.”
Assuming those descriptions were drawn from life, the memo gives credence to Molloy’s idea that what kept people from dressing properly was not lack of funds (as he suspected when he started his research), but bad ideas. Earlier, Orison Swett Marden nodded in agreement with a young reporter who remarked: “If a man did not look prosperous, people would think he did not have the right ambition or the ability to succeed; that there must be something the matter with him or he would dress better and make a better appearance.” (Emphasis mine, because it reminds me of the $14.99 jacket decision.)
The reason the suit was so powerful—so fit to the occasion, as Head would have put it—was that it both revealed and obscured. It gave off the correct signals of affluence, but otherwise didn’t tell you a lot about the person wearing it. And that kind of reticence and mystery, some felt, was integral to finagling your upward mobility. To a significant extent, a suit still operates much like it always has, as anyone who’s attended a meeting wearing a well-fitting dark suit can tell you. You can contribute very little and still get full credit.
Even hopelessly “creative” types have recognized the uselessness of dress rebellions. The midcentury writer and poet Delmore Schwartz in particular was no friend to the Beats and other proud nonconformists. They might pose as if they were “fighting the conformism of the organization man, the advertising executive, the man in the grey flannel suit, or the man in the Brooks Brothers suit,” Schwartz wrote, but in fact these young people had no idea what they were talking about. He felt their rebellion was toothless because it ignored some fundamental realities about power, and making a living. In Growing Up Absurd, Paul Goodman examined the work attitudes amongst the disaffected youth of his day. This is how they reconciled themselves to work, he said: They’d get a job that paid the bills, just barely, just as long as they got to preserve their style. Goodman offered the example of a young man who got a gig dressing windows at Macy’s. He wasn’t really in the Rat Race, this young man would say to himself, because he was just doing it for “bread” and would quit whenever. So, say the boss asked him to shave off his beard. He’d do it; he’d pretend to conform because he had to in order to keep the job. It didn’t mean anything because he was just playing a role anyhow, he’d say. What the Macy’s window dresser failed to understand, Goodman concluded, “is that playing roles and being hip in this way is nearly the same as being an Organization Man, for he doesn’t mean it either.”
Said Schwartz of the man with the corporate acceptance look: “His conformism is limited to the office day and business hours: in private life—and at heart—he is as Bohemian as anyone else. And it is often true that the purpose of the job which requires conformism is solely to support his personal idiosyncrasies, tastes, and inclinations.” The Brooks Brothers man might even let his employer believe he was more committed to the job than he really was—so long as it benefited him personally to do so. But all the while, he’d keep what was private—what was his alone—private. Far from stifling his creativity, willingness to button down sartorially gave him greater freedom of movement on a far grander scale.33
It was all pretty easy when you got right down to it, said The Hucksters’ adman: “… a man’s got to look bright, act like a Racquet Club member even if he isn’t, have two to three simple but good ideas a year, learn how to say yes sir all the time, and no sir once in a while, and every so often have guts enough to pound a client’s desk and tell him that’s the way it’s gotta be… That’s all there is to it.” It took a little costuming, a little play-acting, and not fooling yourself into thinking that hard work alone would be rewarded. “Many men believe that men receive promotions in business due to their efficiency, reliability and hard work, but this is not always true, not even for the boss’s son,” Mol-loy wrote cynically “More often than not, it is the semblance of these qualities that helps success along, rather than the reality of them. To create the look of these qualities, you, your desk and your office must be as neat and precise as possible.”
The reason for this was fairly simple: those who held the reins of power—those who’d been wearing Brooks Brothers since prep school—weren’t all that likely to hand the reins over to anyone who openly challenged their wool-suited conventions. If they didn’t have direct heirs, they still wouldn’t relinquish the family firm to some guy with long hair who smelled of patchouli oil, regardless how talented. Blandly WASPy had more destabilizing potential in the long run. In fact, John Molloy claimed, he could honestly say he had no dog in this fight—he was the consumer’s man, only and ever interested in helping people succeed. He realized he’d be accused of having “snobbish, conservative, bland and conformist” tastes, but defied anyone to prove this wasn’t the best uniform for class warfare. For the lower and middle classes, dressing up like old money made sense from a penny-pinching perspective as well because old-money style— such as it is—did not change with the wind. With minor variations, it was essentially the same, year in and year out.
Head was also adamant that her prescriptions favored the ambitious woman with a limited budget. It meant you wouldn’t have to buy a new wardrobe every season just to keep up with trends. Classic clothing may cost more up front, she admitted, but when you got down to the nitty-gritty, it was far friendlier to the outsider with little cash in hand.
Insider or outsider, committed or not to your corporate life, here are the guidelines both scientific research and the midcentury poet might lay down for you:
Do polish your shoes. Unobservant characters are at a distinct disadvantage here, not least because they tend to assume that their own failure to notice—or care about—scruffy shoes means nobody else will either.
Do own at least one white, button-up collared shirt. Seriously. This is the only clothing item that has consistently been above reproach for the last century. Fashion magazines “rediscover” it with eerie regularity. As became corporate legend, IBM once required its employees to wear white shirts each and every day. Mary McCarthy’s Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, we’re told, always ordered a dozen at a time. The white shirt was the subject of another of Molloy’s twin tests, but this time he asked questions that would assign “moral values” to the shirt, not just socioeconomic ones. Which man would be late to work more often—the one in the white shirt or the other one? Which man was more likely to cheat on his expense account? More than 80 percent of respondents, Molloy claimed, gave the benefit of the doubt to the man in the white shirt. Presumably, women derive the same benefits.
Do realize your desk is your wardrobe. Some superiors want not just tailored shirts, but crisp and clean lines everywhere they look. Letting your desk’s inbox overflow, thinking it will impress upon people how busy, vital, creative, and complicated a person you are, is not a sound idea. An overflowing inbox can just as easily be read as incompetence. (As a colleague remarked in another context, “There’s punk, and then there’s punk like the toilets don’t work.” That is to say, what might suggest only freewheeling genius to you will suggest freewheeling genius plus self-righteous, ineffectual laziness to others.) The following exchange, from an interview with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, was published in the Wall Street Journal
WSJ: You have a reputation for being intently focused on neatness—so much so that your employees get memos on the subject. But creative people often thrive in chaos. Why are you so interested in the condition of a staffer’s desk?
wenner: Well, I’m a neat freak____It seems to me that an orderly desk is reflective of an orderly and organized mind, you know? And there’s a level of immaturity to people who just can’t clean up after themselves. And I don’t think it has anything to do with creativity.
An overflowing inbox can lead to being micromanaged. If you’re working for someone who relies on your organizational skills and who wants, at a glance, reassurance that you’re on top of things, clutter sends the opposite message. Your life then becomes more difficult.
Do wait. Underlings have to wear the expected for a while. “When you reach the top rung it’s a different story,” assured Head. “The eccentricities of the genius who is top man (or woman) on the totem pole of tycoonery are not only condoned but admired. What you wear when you sit in the president’s chair is entirely up to you.” Winston Churchill, everyone knew, directed Britain’s war effort in red pajamas half the time. Albert Einstein could disregard protocol and show up at a formal wedding in a stocking cap, echoed Grace and Fred Hechinger in the anti-anticonformity Teen-Age Tyranny (1962), not because Einstein had been encouraged to do whatever he liked “but because his knowledge and achievements had lifted him to the rare level at which men can fix their own standards in behavior.”
Do, if you’re inclined to break the code, know what the costs are and whether you’re willing to pay them. If you’re going to deviate, deviate with real flair. The most inspired rejections of norms are carefully planned out and tempered by meticulous boringness in other arenas—picture the flamboyantly dressed journalist who turns in clean, workmanlike prose. Successful rebellions are rarely carried out on a whim, and never without taking into consideration the people who’ll be doing the buying, hiring, or selling. My friend Stephanie, for instance, regularly turned up for work looking like a cross between Pippi Longstocking and an overmedicated 1970s housewife. She sported dreadlocks for a while. But she was usually at her immaculately clean desk by 8:30 a.m., and stayed long after most of her colleagues had left for the day. All this to suggest that if you’re going to break code, it’s best to do so spectacularly.
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The Brooks Brothers Man would be trotted out again in the 1970s, this time to poke fun at hippies. Gerald Nierenberg and Henry Calero’s How to Read a Person Like a Book—one of the first books to systematically examine how people revealed themselves through body language—claimed that despite jokes to the contrary, hippies “preen as much as, if not more than, a young executive decked out in a Brooks Brothers suit.” This was because hippies typically had more hair to contend with, the authors continued, so they were often seen brushing it away from their faces.
The sociologist Edward T. Hall—active in the 1950s and ’60s—once remarked that people who lived in cultures in which the rules of social interaction were heavily prescribed were often a little more relaxed: “There is never any doubt in anybody’s mind that, as long as he does what is expected, he knows what to expect from others.” And this provides some relief, he said. It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s certainly true that if somebody or something (like scientific research) decides what you should wear, you’ve saved some mental resources to throw behind other problems. The author of The Power of Positive Thinking (another midcentury hit) claimed that successful men had realized many decisions were simply not worth the time it took to make them, so they subtracted as many decisions from their daily routine as possible—decisions like what to wear.
Meanwhile, rest assured that if you’re a genuine freak, it will show. You won’t be able to hide it. Take a pair of trousers, white shirt, navy blue blazer, and put it on a granola-eating birdwatcher, then put the very same outfit on someone who
meets all his dates at AA meetings and got three hours of sleep the night before, and trust me, you’ll be able to tell who’s who.
7
When It’s Just
Not About You
* * *
Helen Gurley Brown on Having One’s
Underwear Forcibly Removed
“Stuck” is a relative concept.
—ROSABETH MOSS KANTER,
Men and Women of the Corporation
A FEW YEARS AGO, longtime Cosmopolitan editor in chief Helen Gurley Brown described a game that was played at one of her first jobs. Still a high school student, the eighteen-year-old Helen Gurley was working at radio station KHJ in Hollywood, California. The game was called Scuttle, and it began when all the men in the office with time to kill would select a female coworker and set upon her as a group. They would chase her down the halls, up through the music library, and back around to the announcing booths. Once she’d been caught, they would hold her down and remove her underwear. End of game. Everyone would disperse and get back to work. “De-pantying was the sole object,” Gurley Brown recalled in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. No complaint was ever filed, and no Scuttle player was ever reported to the director’s office. Some women chose to cope with the practice by wearing their nicest underwear to work.
Well, that’s neat, I thought upon first reading this. It’s amazing what people will do to kill time, it’s incredible what some people will put up with, and it’s good to be reminded that there are some workplaces so dysfunctional, so deeply and systemically off-kilter, that no matter what you do, you’re going to end up feeling had. Perhaps humiliated, perhaps anxious, but definitely vulnerable. Only at the time you won’t be able to say quite why. You’ll just find yourself wondering whether you should start wearing better panties to work or preemptively kicking people in the shins whenever they get too close.
