Not Enough Slack in the Dress Code

Sergio Valente, si . Wranglers, no.

At least until Friday.

Because in somebody’s history book, Friday went down as V-J Day: V-J, as in Victory for Jeans.

For two months, air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, which directs all high-altitude flights in Southern California, worked under a dress code edict that specified which brands of jeans controllers could and could not wear to work.

The jeans you’d see in Westwood or West Palm Beach, the jeans with their own first names--Calvin, Gloria, Sergio--were OK. The jeans you’d see in Fresno and Fort Wayne, the jeans that go with John Deere tractors--Wrangler, Levi, Lee--were out.

If the jeans that won the West are “good enough for Ronald Reagan to wear at the White House and (his) Santa Barbara (ranch),” said Anthony J. Skirlick Jr., local president of the National Air Traffic Controllers’ Assn., “they ought to be good enough for controllers to wear.”

Point taken. The order was rescinded Friday, said FAA spokeswoman Elly Brekke, but not before, according to Skirlick, some controllers were sent home with orders to change into upscale denim or other togs.

“They had actually, if you can believe this, sent people home to change their jeans,” he said. “And this is at a facility that has overtime and is critically (under) staffed by FAA standards.

“What the hell difference does it make when you’re sitting on the designer label? Who can see it? Who cares?”

But FAA spokesman Russell Park said the dress code originated when a majority of the “very professional” 400-plus controllers asked for a dress policy because of dismay over colleagues who wore “sandals, torn wear, tank tops and sweat shirts with loud and sometimes objectionable words and logos.”

“They honestly feel their image has been hurt in recent months because of the dress problem and other problems,” Park said.

For example, one controller who wore a tank top while being interviewed on television drew complaints from other controllers and pilots, he added.

The memo that detailed good jeans and bad jeans, under columns headed “acceptable” and “unacceptable,” came in mid-May, Brekke said, in response to an earlier employee-drafted dress code that had rather vaguely prohibited “faded blue jeans or non-designer type jeans.”

“There needed to be some clarification in what was meant” by that--hence the rule. And hence a complaint filed by one controller, said Skirlick, a born-and-bred Midwesterner who had not just fallen off the kiwi truck.

Like many controllers, Skirlick said, the man felt it was “just one more stupid thing.”

“We have much more important things to concentrate on. Coming up with red herrings like this doesn’t serve interest of employees,” he said, “or the general public when you have to send people home and have them upset. I don’t think the public wants controllers upset about anything when they’re guiding planes through crowded skies.”

Although that addendum to the dress code has been rescinded, the reference in the dress code’s main section--proscribing faded or non-designer jeans--still stands, Brekke said, and still may require clarification.

The whole thing left Ralph Jolton, Wrangler’s area vice president, puzzled.

Wranglers are “very strong” in the Western and livestock market; the professional rodeo circuit endorses them “to the point where we carry their endorsement on our label, so that becomes a status symbol, and that can be considered a designer label.”

They don’t even mind when someone shows up to work at Wrangler wearing . . . Jordache. “We ask the people in our factories to wear our product; they don’t always do, but all we can do is ask.”

The whole fuss was probably “a generation gap,” Skirlick said. “I have a feeling that most of the people who signed this thing probably can’t fit into jeans any more anyway.”