Once-Suitable On-Job Clothes Now Duds
Interning at a newspaper in the summer of 1970, I was sent home by the city editor for not wearing a tie to work. I was sporting a dress shirt and trousers, but that wasn’t good enough.
The editor’s parting shot as I trudged toward the bus stop: “If you’re going to be a reporter, you ought to dress like one and not like one of the copy boys.”
Well, excu-u-u-u-u-se me.
Of course, I didn’t say that (Steve Martin hadn’t introduced the gag line yet), but I should have.
The copy boys, those maligned wretches who did all the important grunt work around the office, wore blue jeans, tennis shoes and casual shirts.
Thirty years later, that’s exactly what many reporters wear on the job. And even though I’m one heck of a hip guy, it’s taken me a while to make peace with that.
Which brings me to this: Did you hear that Brooks Brothers has packed up and left Fashion Island? The classy-but-conservative clothing store, which has had a home in Newport Beach since 1980, closed its doors Wednesday.
The company didn’t link the closure to today’s casual look on the job, but inquiring minds wonder.
Late last year, for example, a prestigious Boston law firm held a closed-door meeting and told its lawyers they no longer were required to wear suits. “High-tech drives everything now,” an executive of the firm told the Boston Globe. “We were going to meetings with these brilliant young engineers who are wearing blue jeans and Grateful Dead T-shirts. You walk in there wearing a suit and tie, and you start to feel a little odd.”
You can see how that might not square with a Brooks Brothers that sells blazers for $350, ties for $50 and briefs for $14.
CEOs in Purple T-Shirts
As an experiment, I placed a call Thursday to the chief executive officer of Handshake.com, a fledgling Internet company that set up shop in Fullerton last May and soon landed $4 million in venture capital.
The CEO is 23-year-old Ajay Shah. I ask him over the phone what he’s wearing at the office.
“I’m wearing Dockers and an untucked purple T-shirt,” he says. The shirt is plain, with no logo, and Shah laughingly says his fashion decision of the day was whether or not to tuck in the shirt.
Shah previously worked in a more conservative-dress environment at a consulting company. But even it, he says, switched from formal to casual in the last year.
I ask Shah if he thinks office garb means anything. “I think it does send a very strong social statement,” he says, “and that is that high-tech is very much about a meritocracy. You’re as good as you perform, essentially, so things that don’t fall into that class--such as what you’re wearing a particular day or how you choose to color your hair--are much less relevant to how you do business.”
Richard Millar is senior partner in an upscale Newport Beach law firm and says the firm is “half and half. I come from the Brooks Brothers half,” he says, “and the other is the casual-Friday half.”.
Millar, 61, almost always wears a suit and tie to work but concedes the dress code is getting “decidedly more casual.”
I ask if there was some seminal moment when the dress code began relaxing. “Since I have refused to change,” he jokes, “I will not acknowledge any seminal moment.”
He comes from the school that says a professional person’s clothes make a statement. “If someone comes to you with a serious problem, you ought to look like you’re taking it seriously,” Millar says. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”
That’s the way I was brought up, but the times they are a-changing.
Shah has never set foot inside a Brooks Brothers store and says that “not a lot of high-tech executives will claim to owning more than a couple suits.”
But even Shah, who owns several, makes exceptions.
“The only time I actually ever dress up,” the young entrepreneur says, “is when I go to ask for money.”
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.
