Dressing Down Makes Sense for Productivity

How sad it was to read that John T. Molloy, author of “Dress for Success,” is aghast that IBM is junking its white-shirt-and-tie dress code (‘Casual Comes Out of the Closet,” Feb. 4)! If he understood the big picture--that a dress code is a relic of a male work force whose defining model came from World War II, and that a postwar generation raised in Levi’s and T-shirts is taking the reins of control in society--he would be able to write a “Clothing Megatrends” book and run a lot of lucrative workshops on how businesses can dress down their work forces and get better productivity from their workers.

After all, who really works better when they are wearing two to three layers of tight-fitting, very expensive clothing and a tightened noose around the neck? Molloy should take a page from UC Berkeley’s Naked Guy and the Berkeley-affiliated campus computer center, which had a clothing-optional workday in his honor. “Undress for Success” would be a bestseller, don’t you think?

JAMES D. WEINRICH

San Diego