By Their Dresses Ye Shall Know Them
Because, what do you wear to the office when you've been working at home in your pajamas for two years?
It’s been two years since the edict came from our director that we had to take our sh*t off of our desks and head home for two weeks to (ahem) “flatten the curve.” As of December 2021, I was one of the handful of volunteers in our field office to return to the office for three days out of the week.
At first it was pretty scary returning to the office. Everything on my desk was just as I had left it - not a thing had been touched. It was so odd to return to my chair and my computer to remember bus schedules, and get up at at the sound of an alarm, and forage for lunch around downtown Phoenix, an excercise in futility. I actually bring lunch to work - not to economize but because of the frustration of the dearth of choices. Sure there are pricier places for the tourists, but the Subway is gone, homeless people sleep on the patio of the Pizza Hut, and the Dunkin Donuts, and well, let’s just say now I just stay in the office eat last night’s leftovers, and work at my desk.
All the pleasures of office life, the comraderie, the sound of copies being made, the jocular banter with the security guards on the first floor are still notably absent. And the only sound that I hear in the office at around 3:00 p.m. is the sound of the air vents turning on and off again and recalibrating.
In the silence though, I am productive and am happy to have the office to myself to work very hard to serve the taxpayers.
Sadly, this moment of legal staffer bliss is drawing to a close, as we are now receiving e-mails from our superiors in the Capitol that we will be “returning to the office” in phases.
It’s hard to believe that I will have to worry once again about farting too loudly in my cubicle, much less cooking fish in the microwave. But a thornier issue comes to mind as I contemplate the return of my co-workers - that of what I shall wear to work.
At the moment, I see other fellow office workers downtown, and you can tell us old secretaries a mile away. The current uniform for us first wave staffers are cheap yoga pants (because we out grew our dress pants), a top long enough to cover bulging hips, thighs and buttocks, and a sweater, with requisite sensible shoes and medium length hair. It’s our grumpy compromise - not to wear our pajamas to the office, but be as comfortable as we can be because going to work when everyone else is still working from home is hard. I swear all of us state and federal staffers of a certain grade look like this, but lately I’ve been seeing other people who are working downtown and, - dare I say it - they look “dressed for work.”
This has made me think about all of those years I worked in Corporate America, and all those frantic mornings where I struggled to figure out what to wear.
When I started my career as a legal staffer back in the 1980s it was still “risky” for women working in law firms either as attorneys or staffers to wear pants to work. Back then you had to wear a nice dress with a jacket, hoisery and shoes. Your hair not only had to be combed, but coiffed. You had to wear make-up. If you commuted to work and had to run - as I did from the Metra train to Michigan avenue to make it to my desk at 8:50 a.m. you wore gymshoes which you changed at your desk.
I don’t know about any of you, but I can only guess now how many hours I spent pouring over Working Woman magazines and read and reread books like the kind written by John Molloy, in order to perfect my corporate image. We were into our “image” back then, as self-branding was not anything we thought about. [Personal branding came about during the Great Recession of 2007-2008 when corporate dislocations caused many to be laid off from decent jobs and be forced to practice “self-leadership” whatever the hell that means.]
Over time I learned that the best way to cope with the dress code was to have a capsule wardrobe of two complimentary colors, and to make sure you had two of everything because most of the time you did not wear clothes you washed, but you wore clothes that had to be taken to the dry cleaners. God forbid you had most of your clothes at the dry cleaners and you skipped laundry for the week. In those days, when that happened career girls like me bought new outfits at The Limited, or Madigans, or Carson Pirie Scott, in order to have the right office clothes to tide us over until the end of the week.
Now, though, we live in a time when our corporate overlords exercise a different type of control over our worklives one that has far less to do with what we wear, and what we look like, but rather, our “value proposition.”
There are days when I long to go back to the time when even though I had to wear pantyhose everyday to work along with skirts just positioned below the knee, I could go out to lunch to the Walnut Room at Marshall Fields for an hour and have a glass of wine with my meal, and on somedays, me and my co-workers could smoke cigarettes and/or pot in the ladies room.
But now, I wonder, if I should be thinking, once again of “dressing up” for work. Thanks to the uber sedentary lifestyle that I adopted during the lock downs, I have gained weight and don’t want to buy a capsule wardrobe just yet. I am tired of wearing yoga pants and a sweater to the office but am not too keen on looking like a fat white version of Kamala Harris either. I have some ideas as to how I am going to break out of these molds, and forge something new to wear to work, and maybe, just maybe you will see me photographed and dressed here on this blog sporting a new style of career wear for those of us who brave the commute.
I know that these are “first world” problems, and trivial ones at that considering how the world itself is “going to hell in a hand basket” with Russia playing footsie with China right over the Ukraine.
But I won’t worry about all that now, I’ll be sure to think about it later, when I can stand it.
And yet, in the meantime, I do think it’s time that we reconsider the culture of “business casual” and dress for work like we mean it.