Office Uniform Suited to Times or Tradition

I bought my first bow tie in December 1980, as I prepared to fly from the Los Angeles suburbs to the grown-up world of Washington, D.C. I was heading to the halls of Congress--all sober suits and higher purpose--for an internship during my last year of college. The tie was a narrow pink paisley number, purchased to provide that feminine grace note for which my also-brand-new gray flannel skirt suit simply screamed. Black pumps and a pink Oxford shirt completed the ensemble. The result? Well, ugly is probably too harsh a word. Proper is probably pretty accurate. So is boring to the bone, dull enough to die from. But safe. So safe.

All the other adults in the congressman’s office had pretty much clothed themselves from the same closet, this being the heart of the dreaded Dress for Success era. All of them save one: the Hon. Member of Congress himself, who had the fashion sense to wear a deep blue crushed velvet suit to Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration--a black-tie affair that let all those wealthy Palm Springs matrons finally, finally don their full-length minks among the like-minded and in some actual cold.

The Hon. Member of Congress also had the bad sense to sport a mean salmon polyester number with orange top-stitching, alternated with its brother, forest green highlighted with mint.

He stood out. I, on the other hand, did not. What I didn’t know then, but I do know now, is that I had actually wrapped myself in a 110-year-old Symbol with a capital S. Something my poorly paid and overworked sisters had worn as they made their way into America’s offices after the Civil War.

“Women in offices tried to steer their own course: dark skirt, white shirtwaist blouse, often with a tie,” says Valerie Steele, clothing historian and author who teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “Already you see this in the late 19th century--women wearing ties. Every time there’s been a big move toward women in the office, it’s not the most functional item that’s brought in, but the ones most symbolic of professionalism and authority.”

As we slouch our way toward the Big MM in our cozy khakis and comfort-soled shoes, it’s not a bad idea to rifle through the wardrobes of the workers who went before us--those men and women unfortunate enough to toil at a time when people heading to the office on a Monday morning looked far different from those destined for the garden on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

The modern office uniform has its roots around the turn of a different century, when the 1700s were bleeding into the 1800s. That’s when men’s suits and ties were really born, for better or worse. While our collar-wincing brethren might complain, Anne Hollander, author of “Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress,” regards the men’s suit as a design icon. “Suits do have a way of looking superior,” she writes. Since the men’s suit was born, she says, women’s work wear has flailed about, striving toward a similar standard.

“This eventually had to mean women not dressing as men,” she writes, “but finding a female way to wear clothes that look both sexually interesting and ordinarily serious . . . at the same time, the way men did. This took several generations to achieve.”

No kidding. Interestingly enough, Steele notes, the advice that working women have received about what to wear when they go to work has changed not a bit in the last 100 years. The first real dress-for-success article was published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1907, suggesting that working women should not wear sheer shirtwaists or trailing velvet skirts.

“In the same way, [the early 1900s working woman] shouldn’t be misguided and go ‘severity mad’ and make herself look ‘ridiculously masculine,’ ” Steele recounts. “They claimed she would only be ‘a feeble imitation of a man,’ advice which has been endemic ever since.”

Fast forward to 1959 and see how little had changed in the world of What to Wear to the Office, half a century notwithstanding. That’s the year I was born, fated to buy the pink paisley bow by the time I was 21. It’s also the year that famed costumer Edith Head wrote a book called “The Dress Doctor.”

What did the woman who clothed Kim Novak (fitted slate gray suit, “Vertigo”) and Barbara Stanwyck (trashy white outfits, “Double Indemnity”) suggest for all of us working women? “Working wives must cultivate two separate fashion philosophies,” she wrote, with her intimate knowledge of both. “No man wants a brisk executive-looking woman at the dinner table, and no man wants a too-alluring creature gliding around his office.”

Steele is amazed at how the more things change, the more they stay the same. The same kinds of advice erupt whenever women are entering the workplace or raising their status there in any numbers. “Basically, the overall trend has been to advise something tailored like a man, but with enough touches of femininity so they don’t look too severe,” Steele says. So when was the girl-tie most popular? The 1860s through 1910 and again in the 1970s and the early 1980s. Enough said.

If, as most fashion historians suggest, the men’s suit is the office archetype, it helps to know a little bit more about it. The basic suit as we know it today has changed only in detail in the last 100 years.

The typical men’s suit--the so-called sack suit with its unfitted jacket and pants of matching material--started out as casual clothing, laborer’s wear, in the 19th century. By the early 20th century, the sack suit had become office wear--with or without a vest, sometimes with narrow lapels, sometimes broad, sometimes the jacket is buttoned, sometimes not. Ties are wide, ties are narrow, there are three buttons on the cuff some years and four buttons on certain others. A recent exhibit of Hickey Freeman suits from 1909 to the present set up in the Forbes magazine gallery was testimony to the lack of significant change in the male workplace uniform.

“However, today we’re pushing pretty hard on the primacy of the man’s suit,” says Melissa Leventon, a dress historian and curator of textiles for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “It’s very interesting to look at who still wears suits and under what circumstances. [They are the norm] in industries considered rather conservative like banking. You tend to find suits being worn, in industries where suits are not always required, by people in the upper echelons.”

Leventon notes that some of the blame for the late 1990s attack on the suit belongs squarely in the lap of the laptop kings--those anti-establishment Silicon Valley types whose jeans and T-shirts, the “hacker uniform” of the last 30 years, have bled into the wider workplace as the loved and reviled Casual Friday.

“The suit is sort of a uniform,” she says. “It’s an easy uniform. You can be reasonably certain of being appropriately dressed most of the time. Then all of a sudden it’s decreed that you can abandon the suit. It’s tough to figure out what do you do. How casual is it appropriate to go?”

Casual Fridays and Casual Mondays and the inevitable Casual Every Days have been blamed for everything from ruining suit and tie sales, forcing men and women to buy yet a third wardrobe (home, work, now in between) and breaking down the barriers of class in the workplace. They’ve been credited with creating higher productivity and fostering morale.

Actually, what they have mostly caused is mass confusion and a niche for retailers such as Levi Strauss & Co., which spent much of the 1990s teaching American workers just how casual casual could be. The San Francisco company has conducted widespread surveys of the American office and appropriate attire. The most recent survey in 1997 found that 53% of American office workers say they are allowed to dress casually to work every day--a 22% increase from 1995. That equates to about 16 million more people tossing off their suits and ties on the way to the office than two years earlier.

The jeans firm--which started life by creating the quintessential work uniform for miners and cowboys--put together a four-minute video and a raft of written rules to help put boundaries around the squishy term “casual.” Wear clean clothes, the company advised. No wrinkles in those ubiquitous khakis, no tube tops, no flip-flops, no tanks. Sounds like a no-brainer, but it obviously wasn’t. The company shipped tens of thousands of its kits to businesses throughout the country; 400 of the Fortune 500 firms asked for guidance.

At this point, we’re way past the old “slacks or no slacks” question for women, so far past that it seems almost quaint that we even worried about such a thing and not all that long ago. If the ‘90s are the Khakis Decade and the ‘80s the Power Suit Decade for women and men alike (remember all those yellow ties and red suspenders and “Bonfire of the Vanities” chic?), the ‘70s would have to be the Decade that Women Won the Pants War.

After years spent flirting with pants in the wider workplace, by the 1970s “the battle of the pants was won and the battle of the suits was also won,” Leventon said. “And for women in the high-tech industry, if you’re an engineer and you’re a woman, then nobody is going to look twice if you wear jeans just like all of the male engineers.”

As a clothing historian and close observer of American dress patterns, Leventon wonders what revolution will transform the workplace uniform next. “Maybe piercing and tattoos,” she muses, only slightly in jest.

Leventon recalls an acquaintance in the energy consulting business who applied for and won a job at a company in San Francisco’s East Bay. Nobody looked twice at his blond ponytail. Then the Friday before he started his job he called and asked if he could wear his earring to work. Sure, they said.

“And Jonathan came to work with 21 earrings,” Leventon recalled, among other piercings thankfully harder to discern. “It really took them aback. He felt he better not reveal he was into piercing while interviewing but felt comfortable to show that side of himself at work. Had he been in a public relations firm it might not have flown.”

Or maybe it would have. When my husband and I moved to San Francisco three years ago, he began work at a mid-sized public relations and advertising company, where PR executives trended toward the button-down and advertising folks were a bit more flamboyant. After he’d been on the job for about a year, the company hired a new receptionist, a twentysomething woman with Goth tendencies. The longer she worked there, the more black-clothed and kohl-eyed she became, but she always kept to one discipline: She only wore her tongue bolt one day a week.

Now, that’s Casual Friday for you.