The Corporate Clone Look: Why So Much Pressure to Conform?

Cindy Sheehan was barred from attending the State of the Union address although she held an official invitation from Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey. The official reason given was that Sheehan was wearing an anti-war t-shirt, and I can almost believe it. Didn’t she realize that the dress code in American culture at large is often as strict as in the military?

When I was at a job fair, researching Bait and Switch, I listened as a corporate recruiter explaining the importance of sartorial conformity to a couple of beaten-down looking job seekers. There was this highly qualified stock trader, he was telling them, with a stellar track record, but he didn’t get the job. And you know why? He was wearing a blue shirt. The recruiter let a beat go by as we absorbed this shocking fact. But on Wall Street, the recruiter continued triumphantly, you have to wear a white shirt. (Note to Cindy: T-shirts weren’t even in the running.)

The dress code can be particularly baffling to women, if only because women haven’t been out in the corporate world long enough to have an established “uniform.” In the “dress for success” literature we learn not to look “too feminine” or of course “too sexy.” Shoulder length hair has to go; large breasts should be concealed under mannish jackets. Corporate dress guru John Molloy actually warns women against the “too busty” look, as if an elective double mastectomy might be a good career move.

There’s a book just out that puts these demands for conformity in a new and revealing context—that of civil rights. In Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, Yale law professor Kenji Yoshino tells of being warned, as a gay man, that he should act like a “homosexual professional” rather than a “professional homosexual” if we wanted to get tenure. I know Yoshino, who’s a friend of my daughter’s, and he’s an extremely buttoned-down young man – no tight leather pants or whatever your stereotype is. Still, he had to be warned: it’s OK to be gay, just not too gay.

Yoshino gives a number of other examples. In 1981, American Airlines fired an African-American flight attendant for wearing cornrows to work, and a federal district court upheld her firing. She could be black, just not too black – never mind that she got the cornrow idea from Bo Derek in the movie “10.”

Or there’s the case of Simcha Goldman, an Air Force officer who was also an ordained rabbi. Goldman was threatened with a court martial for wearing a yarmulke, and when he sued, claiming religious discrimination, the Supreme Court ruled against him, drawing a line between “religious apparel which is visible and that which is not.”

These examples show the limits of “diversity” in our corporate/bureaucratic culture. You can be black, but don’t flaunt it with a distinctively African hairstyle. You can be Jewish as long you don’t conform to Orthodox Jewish head-covering rules. You can be female if you succeed in covering your female physical traits. You can even, in a liberal setting like Yale Law School, be gay-- if you’re willing to play that down.

But it’s not only the civil rights of minorities that are potentially stake here. Think of the poor stock trader who dared to wear blue or the probably much more common white-guy case of being just a little rumpled and overweight. Should someone have to lose 20 pounds and shop at Brooks Brothers to get a job in corporate America?

What our dress-obsessed corporations seem to be saying is: We don’t want diversity. We want everyone to look – and preferably behave – exactly the same. In other words, we’re afraid of individual differences, whether they’re rooted in race, gender, religion, etc. or in just plain quirkiness. No one seems to be worried about what happens to creativity when everyone is required to look like a clone.

There was of course a brief window in the 90s when the dot-com companies allowed for more freedom of dress. I knew guys who went to work in t-shirts, jeans and bright green sneakers, and it wasn’t their wardrobes that caused the bubble to burst. Similarly, I suspect that the State of the Union address would have been no less inspiring – or maddening – if the live audience had contained one person wearing a t-shirt stating the number of US casualties in Iraq.

Yoshino argues that demands for conformity to some imagined straight, white, male “mainstream” aren’t just an issue for minority groups, but for all of us. “. . . We must shift away from claims that demand equality for particular groups,” he wrote in the New York Times Magazine (1/18/06), “toward claims that demand liberty for us all.”

I agree. We’re all being squeezed into boxes that are much too narrow for us. Why put up with it for another minute?

Comments

[Terry Mitchell]

I've never understood the need for dress codes. If I owned a business, I wouldn't care if my employees came to work in their underwear, as long as they got the job done.

[janinsanfran]

Dress codes are major enforcement mechanisms of gender rules.

[theresa]

In the Inferno, Dante spent his entire visit to Hell being hounded by the residents who wanted to expel him because he didn't fit in and didn't belong.

[Sharon]

Theresa, you just described my previous two jobs! I'm a recovering software engineer, now a library student and part-time library technical assistant. Janinsanfran, I agree that dress codes have more to do with enforcing gender rules/roles than anything else.

[Mitchell Freedman]

If one is in a company position that requires one to deal with the public, cornrows, piercings, overly obvious religious symbols, t-shirts, etc. are verboten for the same reason they say "Happy Holidays" in December. You don't want to offend any potential customers.

I can't justify most wrongful termination claims by employees in those situations, can you?

[Hattie]

I'm ambivalent about dress codes. They are the outward signs of a repressive attitude toward workers, to be sure. It's a strange matter to me, the whole business of self presentation in the work place.
I was a teacher of prisoners until I retired a year ago. It was always OK for me to wear jeans and comfortable shoes to work. I dressed like the female version of my male students but with long hair and jewelry.
I was seriously annoyed once by a man in our prison facility who made a huge issue out of refusing to trim his beard when his work problems had more to do with his dislike for the job. He managed to make everyone look bad on that one, whether you took his side on the matter or not.
I also know that lots of women have to "dress sexy" to please their employers, like the saleswomen at our local health food store who wear low-rise pants and cut off tops that display their bellies. The guys like it, of course. They are constantly hitting on these women.I suppose it brings in business.

[theresa]

People who deal with customers should dress professionally when in contact with them, as they are representing the company, but most people toil out of sight, and those should be able to wear whatever, within means.

Usually when dress codes are adopted, or an employee is "coached" on wardrobe matters, one must suspect something more is going on. Schools that adopt dress codes tend to be in very poor districts that have given up on the kids, and only want them to behave. Jobs that implement dress codes tend to use tham as a test to see who will most willingly conform. When that is the test, rather than how well they are doing on the job, management is no longer focused on productivity, rather they are grasping for control. This occurs when accountibility has somehow gotten skewed or, I've seen, the top people have lost interest in anything but preserving their positions.

So dress codes are a big red flag that something else is going on, and it usually isn't good.

[A3K]

The place I work abandoned "casual Friday" after several employees took it to such ridiculous extremes (torn jeans, stained sweatshirts, etc.). Many of them reasoned that since they don't directly meet clients, nobody need worry how they looked.

The problem is that everyone comes in the same entrance, whether they meet clients, don't meet clients or ARE clients.

Would it make sense to have a front entrance for clients and people who meet clients and a back entrance for people who prefer to dress like they intend to dig a ditch immediately after work? That might solve the problem so the molemen can ignore their appearances and the hoochie-mamas and bag ladies can feel free to outwardly express their inner slob.

BTW, now we're expected to have a collared shirt and dress slacks. It's horribly oppressive.

Yawn.

BTW, both Cindy AND a woman wearing a "Support Our Troops" T-Shirt were escorted out. Only Cindy got significant press. Hmmmm.

[chitown01]

The wonderful era of the late 1990s with its plentiful jobs and high demand for workers brought "business casual" not only to the "dot coms," but even to many banks and law firms--indeed, a more casual white collar workplace has become the norm. The big threat today is the sound of reactionary pressure to go back to "business attire." (We even hear some of those murmurings in this blog.)

I lived for decades in the hope that by the turn of the 21st century, the necktie would disappear. That garment, an ancient symbol of servitude, deserves to be on the bottom of the dustbin of history. It would be a sad thing if the bosses were able to bring it back. I'll get some wool slacks, if you insist, but spare me the necktie.

[Paul]

It's well known that Dubya insists on being surrounded by 'yes' people - people that agree with him and his views. This was obvious at most of his public appearances where his staff ensured that the audience was seeded with people that did not have dissenting views. Cindy, wearing a T-shirt that expressed a dissenting view on the war in Iraq, was obviously viewed by security as someone threatening to the president and his doctrine, and therefore was removed so as not to make the president look bad to the public.

But regardless of what was on the T-shirt, I believe a T-shirt was not appropriate for this event, and I am sure she knew it, having concealed it with a coat to gain entrance, and then removing the coat to make a political statement. While I agree with free speech, I think she chose the wrong time and place to make a statement.

Aside from the Cindy incident, dress codes are an interesting subject. Many years ago I was shopping for new wall-to-wall broadloom, and the sales rep was a man smartly dressed in a nice business suit with shirt and tie. His appearance inspired my confidence in him, his company, and his products. Imagine my shock days later when the installers showed up in ratty, dirty, and torn clothes; my first impression was that these were incompetent slobs and the carpet was not going to be installed properly. (yes, it was installed ok, but none-the-less, I felt they were dragging street dirt into my home).

All my life, I worked for a large multi-national computer company. In the beginning, they were fastidious about dress code: it had to be a dark suit, white shirt, and conservative tie. I remember a fellow coming into work one day, with a wild paisley tie and pale pink shirt - he was sent home to change! During the first part of my career with this company, I worked as a service technician (only they called them 'engineers', much to the annoyance of the IEEE) that worked on electro-mechanical business machines. This frequently meant we would get our clothes dirty with oil, grease, ink, and other dirt. Yet, we were required to be dressed in a business suit. (fortunately, when actually working on a machine, we were allowed to remove our suit jacket, roll up our sleeves, and tuck our tie into our shirt). But I never minded this dress - it gave us a feeling of importance and our clients perceived an image of professionalism. (Do you see that when a plumber comes to your house?)

After about 15 years of hardware service, I moved to a desk job, doing software development and maintenance. Although I worked in a cube-farm and had little or no contact with external customers, I still had to dress much the same. However, in this environment, there were many more female workers, and I was somewhat pissed that the same business dress code did not apply to them. Many came to work in sundresses and sandals, hardly what I would consider business dress. Sort of a double standard, but still, I felt I looked more professional and that made me feel good.

Gradually, standards began to drop and we started having casual Fridays. Eventually, the dress code changed to 'business casual' for the entire week. This was never clearly defined, but was supposed to be clean and neat; it eventually degraded to shorts, torn and/or dirty jeans, dirty sneakers, etc. (I remember when the casual fad took flight with all the businesses, one clothier stressed in his advertising that if you come home from work and don't change your clothes, then you weren't wearing 'business casual'.) In the end, I returned to wearing a sports jacket with shirt and tie, partly for appearance, but more because the office was always so cold and it kept me warm.

[theresa]

Here's some thoughts related to TV, but that still have an effect on "perception."

"The maverick economist Kenneth Boulding had published a book called "The Image" in 1956, but Boulding was mostly interested in the fact that people's behavior is often based on pictures they hold of the world that may have little empirical basis but that serve as "reality." Boulding thought that this raised intriguing epistemological issues. Though Daniel Boorstin, the University of Chicago historian, found the epistemology of the image intriguing, too, his book was a jeremiad. Visual images were central to the culture that Boorstin was attacking, but by the term "image" he meant something all-encompassing, something like a substitute reality...Boorstin thought that the image had taken over not because of anything to do with the nature of capitalism (a word that, amazingly, does not appear in his book) but because Americans couldn't face ordinary life, in which the excellent and the extraordinary are rare, and most things are difficult, imperfect, disappointing, or boring. Americans needed their experience to be constantly sweetened, like chewing gum, and a whole industry had grown up to provide this artificially enhanced reality. Boorstin thought that this pseudo-world had become, Matrix-like, so nearly complete that it controlled even its controllers...David Greenberg means "image" in the broader sense, as the name for any self-conscious or manufactured presentation. But their attitude toward the "culture of the image" is the same. They think that people don't read images so much as they read into images-that what they make of an image is conditioned by who they are and by what they already know. Those radio listeners who thought that Nixon won the debates heard what they were trained to hear and, as we all do, what they wanted to hear...People file their images in separate compartments-news in one place, ads in another-and don't think to compare them.

"Marshall McLuhan published his big book, "Understanding Media," in which he took to task technological troglodytes like White and Boorstin. White had got it completely backward about the debates, McLuhan said. Nixon on television wasn't "fuzzed": he was, on the contrary, too well defined. Television dislikes definition; it favors blurriness. This is why movie stars don't travel well when they go over to television, and it is why Kennedy "won" the debates. Television is, in McLuhanite terms, a "cool" medium. Because the television image is relatively minimal, TV viewers become, paradoxically, more engaged. They are continually filling in information; so, as McLuhan explained, "anybody whose appearance strongly declares his role and status in life is wrong for TV." Nixon "lost," in other words, because he looked like a candidate for president. "When the person presented looks classifiable, as Nixon did, the TV viewer has nothing to fill in. He feels uncomfortable with his TV image. He says uneasily, 'There's something about that guy that isn't right.'" Kennedy's asset, therefore, was not his "crispness," as White imagined, but his blurriness. He "did not look like a rich man or like a politician. He could have been anything from a grocer or a professor to a football coach. He was not too precise or too ready of speech in such a way as to spoil his pleasantly tweedy blur of countenance and outline."

-- From MASTERS OF THE MATRIX by LOUIS MENAND

[JP Merzetti]

I find this corporate cloning look pervasive throughout society.
On men's hair styles...there is something profoundly militaristic to me about this look...as if the young graduate has just been honorably discharged from the army, not a successful completion of an "education."
As a card-carrying boomer - of course my attitude betrays an historical bias. However, I think that's entirely beside the point.
To me, it is a matter of esthetics. A fuller head of hair softens the boniness, the stick-out ears, and that stark, bleak "concentration camp" look.
Some men looked good in beards...some men looked good resembling that be-wiskered turn of the century politician look...some men of Celtic backgroung looked great sporting a full moustache...etc.
This is all gone - morphed into a bland vanilla pudding of corporate dictation.
Ever notice that in many high fashion magazines, young male models are often long-haired? Why is that?
(seems to me they are obviously too cool to be corporate.)
It makes me sad every time I see a young pre-shool crowd. The girls all have hair - the boys don't.
I'm startled - every time I see a highschool boy with hair over his ears...rare.

I guess this is my point. All this reflects an era, to me, of a very conservative time...the 1950's.
Nostalgia for that era never meant a damned thing to me. I remember it as a time of extreme oppression, gullibility, McCarthyism, and an overall embarassingly naive exceptance of bad decisions and awful mistakes...the Cold War, the Industrial Military Complex, the arms buildup, the Interstate system, urban decay, and an entire shift in corporate thinking that was ultimately due to bring us the joys of globalisation, outsourcing, offshoring, downsizing, sprawl, wasteful energy depletion, global warming, etc. etc.
And to think that one third of the world's population emulates and imitates this...over in Asia. (China and India.)
I guess the hair thing is just a symbol...along with the suit.
I do believe that "style" is used as a form of tyranny.
I don't smoke in public, to protect the public from the affects of second-hand exhalation. Yet millions of kids have asthma - not from second-hand smoke. From where?
Millions of women wear heels...in spite of the fact that it is well-known what those heels do to their backs. Yet this is somehow okay.
Is this not an insidious bit of hypocrisy?
(how many tight neckties out there are cutting off oxygen to the brain?)
A pretty lame excuse for corporate stupidity, what?

[theresa]

It's funny JP --

What we now call "the business suit" was once called "the lounge suit" that gentleman of the upper class UK sort would wear during the day (when not hunting or golfing or playing tennis or riding their acres or fishing or stalking deer) when lunching with friends, reading the Army/Navy book in their clubs, or puttering around town. The tie was the most important accessory -- it signalled others as to your school or regimental affiliations, a sign you would spot in others as well, and enable all interactions to proceed on already established cultural rules.

But I'll bet that those insisting on re-establishing dress-codes do not know this. All they know is "suits are good" because they heard it at the latest management training seminar.

[Jeff Scott]

I think it is great that many people here are stating their opinions about this issue. I also would like to say that my hair (a little longer than shoulder length) Seems to be an issue at work now. What is funny is that i can find post after post on the internet that talks about how this is unfair and wrong, but the truth is that corporations have more money and better lawyers than their employees and can force thier opinion on us, and there is not a damn thing we can do about it. I have went to my congrassment, i have went to the ACLU, i have even asked Bill Orieley.... The truth is that nobody that matters cares and guys will not be accepted with long hair until the guys in that are in their 20s/30s run congrass. As long as the 80 year old men run the country then we will be 80 years behind reality.

[Laure Miller]

At the local VA hospital, the new Grand Fromage has decreed that all doctors must wear neckties. One of the nurses burst out laughing and referred to neckties as "bacteria sticks". Another employee asked, "What about the female doctors? Must they wear neckties, too?"

Needless to say, these employees went through hell at work for weeks.

I am fortunate in that I could show up to work in fuzzy bunny slippers and my boss wouldn't say a word. But I like to dress in "business casual" to go to work. It is tougher to get ready to face a day of Office Work if I am wearing baggy, stained sweats. Getting dressed presentably is part of my week - the sweats are for weekends only, when I am lounging or gardening or doing house repair/renovation.

My kids have a dress code at their school, and other schools in the area have gone to uniforms. I don't see it as the school having "given up" on the students. Your super-pricey private schools use uniforms, too.

oh - another thought here, about "Casual Fridays". You ever notice how the management never indulges in wearing jeans? Only the lowly.....

[NYCDidi]

I could rail about this topic until the cows come home. I utterly despise the monochromatic, unflattering(unless you are a stick figure), overpriced, impractical, confining female Dress for Success look. I have found my own solution, but it wouldn't work for everyone: the Salwar Kameez, the tunic, loose pants and shawl worn throughout South Asia. I started wearing them on a trip to Nepal 5 years ago and haven't gone back to western clothing since. Since I live in an Indian neighborhood I can buy them very cheaply($25-50 for an entire outfit, good luck finding an Ann Taylor blouse for that much). There are eBay sellers in India who will make a tailor made SK for you for under $50 including shipping. I am fortunate to work at a very liberal college and dread if I should lose my job and have to go on interviews in 'work drag' again. Styles range from slinky to concealing, available in just about any fabric and they are flattering to everyone. They have the practicality of pants plus the elegance of a dress. Since all the pieces match you aren't stuck with a closet full of separates that don't go with anything. They are a way to wear color(why this aversion to color in modern Western society???) without looking like a '70s pimpette or resident of a Florida retirement community. They are suitable for every age and are as comfortable as jeans but much more dignified, as much so as a western suit. I hope with the rise of India as an economic power and the prominence of desi immigrants in the U.S. the salwar kameez will be more acceptable as business attire, as opposed to Indian women adopting more western attire, as men have already done.

[keith balzer]

Well I am a soldier and I am god. And I created the internet so you can deny your maker and post anti-american threads. you are a traitor!

just kidding. Thanks for taking the courage and using the resources you have to your use to produce your ends. Even if general zod wants to take away his toys now that you won't play war games with him.

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[Gerson Williams]

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