I flipped open my copy of the NYT this a.m. and was immediately agog at article and photos about why I should be wearing shorts to work, preferably with dress shoes, a tie and maybe even a jacket. Working in an industry that many consider to be relatively hip (I am not making this up), I immediately felt inadequate- -- my brethren in the ad agency biz were clearly on the cutting edge of fashion here, while those of us in the more sedate roles of communicators were still living in the past.
As an aside, I'm endlessly fascinated by the way dress code gets communicated. One day I came to work to discover that there had been some sort of secret signal sent out to all the women in the office to move from shoes to sandals. The weather was the same on Friday as it was on Monday, but on Monday there were toes everywhere. Was there an email message? A twitter tree? Or was it something that simply appeared from the collective id over a weekend? Clearly, I had not received the message, shod as I was.
But back to the NYT article -- if the move from shoes to sandals was a quiet signal, this has the subtlety of a jackhammer, and the credibility as well. When you are reduced to quoting a hockey player on an internship at Vogue, an ad agency exec in that paragon city of Fashion, Salt Lake, and an 80 year old NY lawyer, along with references "a pack of stylish young men," then you have a story placed by a clothing company looking to expand sales. The money quote that lays lie to the "trend" is pretty far down in the story:
That may be. Yet none of the New York City banks, law firms, stock brokerages or hospitals contacted by a reporter last week considered shorts an acceptable part of a work uniform, and for reasons that varied from the need to preserve institutional decorum to hygiene (imagine a hairy leg in an O.R.)
Phew.