This morning, there was an article in the paper about the return of the slip - the kind you wear under dresses - or you used to never not wear under any clothes that weren't pants.
It seems like just yesterday that the rules for dressing were the same ones that our mothers (and fathers) and even grandparents have used for years.
Women wore skirts and dresses and stockings and slips and bras. Men wore suits and ties and wingtips.
My freshman year in college, women were not allowed to wear pants except on the weekends. Seriously. And this was not at all unusual for east coast colleges and universities. But, that was really the beginning of the end. The real end would come some 40 years later and by that time the cycle seems to be just ready to cycle again.
I worked for IBM for 15 years. The dress code was carved in stone and unbreakable. No pants for women. (I remember a summer intern secretary one day asking the branch manager if a 'tasteful pant suit' would be acceptable. With a facial expression like he had just tasted dog shit, he declared that 'tasteful pant suit' was an oxymoron.)
And men wore white shirts and navy or gray suits and neckties (tasteful). Once in a while you'd get a rebel with a brown suit and some guy might wear a black one if all his others were in the cleaners but otherwise, there was no deviation. I remember in the early 90's when the stone the code was carved in was beginning to crumble, some of the marketing executives started getting kinky with monograms - on the cuff and often white.
Always white shirts. The executives wore expensive ones. The CE's (service guys) wore cheap ones. They had it tough - especially the copier repair guys. They went through shirts like candy AND were always getting mistaken for Mormon missionaries.
In 1989, I moved to California and things started to unravel. Dress Down Fridays was the beginning of the end. And the only reason it even got a toe hold was that by then more of the asses in executive chairs were of the female persuasion. The men wanted no part of it. The men at the top of the food chain and the men at the bottom. They were dragged kicking and screaming into khakis and golf shirts.
My friend, Jim bitched about it until the day he finally left IBM about 10 years later. He said cost him a good 30 minutes every morning just having to decide and find something to wear. His work clothes were easy - they rotated every day and divided their time between his closet and the dry cleaners. Dress down clothes had a whole different set of rules.
I've spent the past 10 years in my neighborhood with a few years working out on the Microsoft campus. The dress code in both places has been kind of "please cover yourself, please but if not... well, please do." And then Starbucks moved a lot of their corporate offices into the building across the street. Now we have 8 floors of folks climbing up the ladder of a large corporation. A lot of those people are women and the 'hood is full of women dressed for business. I don't know if they are wearing slips or not but it is still strange to me to see these women dressing up. I'm glad I don't have to participate.
I don't know if dress is dictated by management - I'm guessing it's more peer pressure. I wonder how these young workers feel about it or if they even think about it.
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