To paraphrase Mark Twain concerning the idea that clothes make the man - or woman: Yes, it is true that naked people rarely have made a favorable impression while banging the closing gavel at the New York Stock Exchange.
Clothing is essential to business dress. Very few of us can do what New York City's "naked cowboy" does - strum a guitar for tourists on Broadway, wearing only his cowboy hat and Fruit of the Looms. Most of us can't sing either.
There was a period, which I believe is fading, when Western business went through a rather juvenile period of dressing like Britney Spears and Kid Rock. This informality was contagious during the latter part of the dot.com boom of the late 1990s. Some people nearly died of it. Dressing down became a badge of honor and a symbol of freedom of expression.
It made the statement: "Look at us. We're cooler than you are."
In the advertising business, having an odd hair color and going sockless helped hammer this home, what with a shaggy haircut, the ever-present earring and the dirty T-shirt reading, "Eat me," or bearing some irrelevant poetry. It all seemed rather unhygienic, a breeding ground for the dreaded diseases of the 16th century.
Admittedly, this was mostly confined to what is generally known as the "creative group," a term with which I have always taken exception because it suggests everyone else in the company was brain dead when it came to proffering ideas. My view is that commercial idea people are made not born. Shakespeare was born.
However, this odd dress seemed to help with clients. They liked to have a creative director who looked the part.
I sometimes felt we could pick the goofiest-appearing character we could get from Central Casting, have him memorize a creative presentation and win the business every time. The amazing thing is that most creative directors, when it comes to dress, are total conformists. None wear socks. They all wear T-shirts adorned with the image of Che Guevara. They all have the obligatory earring and hairstyles they borrowed from Jesus Christ Superstar. This suggests that if all are weird, none are weird. They are white bread and vanilla.
I don't claim to be Mr. Blackwell, the fashion maven who each year reveals his list of the 10 Worst-Dressed People, and who, to my knowledge, has never listed a business type. While I've never owned a leisure suit, I have also never been a fashion leader, with the possible exception of during the 1970s, when I wore cowboy shirts, Indian jewelry and suede pants. At the time, I was writing a national country music column, and was dressing for the times and for the part. You may remember that this was the period when we also wore bellbottoms and thought Fellini movies (though we were not sure we understood them) were deeper than Biblical revelations. We read Ulysses in the park, hoping a cute blonde would casually pass by. None of us ever finished it.
But the purpose here is not to chastise.
I favor that same freedom of expression, but I would like to see it explode in a fashionable business dress, whether black conservative or Tom Wolfe white, complete with cane, scarf and homburg. This doesn't necessarily mean the standard silk tie.
I think this dressing down conspiracy began with the human resources director who came up with the bright idea of Casual Fridays. Have you ever heard of anything more absurd than dressing to the nines four days a week, and like a slob on the fifth traditional working day? Think about it. It makes absolutely no sense.
If it were good for business, wouldn't everyone dress for Casual Friday every day? It would appear that Casual Friday was part of a grand experiment to prove that people worked harder and with more creativity when allowed to dress like clowns. If this hypothesis is true, then suits, ties, skirts and dresses should be forever banned from the workplace as a hindrance to commerce. There should be a big bonfire into which all we business-types toss our dress-up duds, hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
But that's not the way it is. Some of the most embarrassing moments I find are when I meet with a client, often a CEO or managing director, in his office on a Casual Friday. He (or she) immediately begins to apologize for his dress, noting that, yes indeed, the company has
a causal Friday policy. This doesn't add an iota to the business discussion, for I have this mental picture of the guy with a tennis racket in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. It doesn't make him more creative, but it does make him less serious.
The fact of life is that one dresses for the position to which one aspires. If your aspiration is to be a gardener, and your company allows it, then by all means dress down. At a certain point in my life, I aspired to write for Rolling Stone magazine, and hence the colorful getup of the latest 70s country/rock group. I didn't make it. I didn't come close.
Thereafter, my goal was to advise politicians on Capitol Hill, a position I held for a number of years. It is doubtful I would have had much credibility in a cowboy hat, unless perhaps I was advising folks in Wyoming. These days, I advise corporations on how to avoid crises and how to tackle a crisis once it is on your doorstep. Wonder what the CEO would think if I showed up in sandals and a T-shirt reading "Born to Eat Pizza."
It would not inspire confidence.
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