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DRESSING FOR SUCCESS
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Business New Haven
10/9/1995
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Because we live in a classless society, every serious researcher who has studied the psychological and emotional impact of business dress has concluded, naturally, that the class associations of corporate clothing mean everything.
And while the particular class one might wish his wardrobe to associate with depends upon the audience, the generic corporate wardrobe remains inextricably linked to the upper-middle strata of society.
John T. Molloy, “America's first wardrobe engineer,” put it best in his landmark 1975 book (frequently updated) Dress for Success: “Successful dress is really no more than achieving good taste and the look of the upper-middle class.” Through far-reaching and often surprising research, Molloy documented that “in matters of clothing, conservative, class-conscious conformity is absolutely essential to the individual success of the American business and professional man.”
But it's not just about conformity. In his acerbic, take-no-prisoners 1983 treatise on Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, author Paul Fussell digs deeper into sartorial symbolism. “The wearing of clothes either excessively new or excessively neat and clean suggests that your social circumstances are not entirely secure,” he writes. And although cleanliness may be next to godliness, “Laboring to present yourself as scrupulously clean and neat suggests that you're worried about status slippage and that you care terribly about what your audience thinks, both low signs. The perfect shirt collar, the too neatly tied necktie knot, the anxious overattention to dry cleaning - all betray the wimp.”
Take neckties. Fussell notes that the subject of men's neckties “deserves a book in itself...The principle that clothing moves lower in status the more legible it becomes applies to neckties with a vengeance. The ties worn by the top classes eschew the more obvious forms of verbal or even too crudely symbolic statement, relying on stripes, amoeba-like foulard blobs or small dots to make the point that the wearer possesses too much class to specify right out in front what it's based on...Moving down [the class rung], we come to necktie patterns with a more overt and precise semiotic function. Some, designed to announce that the upper-middle-class wearer is a sport, will display diagonal patterns of little flying pheasants, or small yachts, signal flags, and sextants. ('I hunt and own a yacht. Me rich and sporty!')
“Just below these are the 'milieu' patterns, designed to celebrate the profession of the wearer and to congratulate him on having so fine a profession. These are worn either by insecure members of the upper-middle class (like surgeons) or by members of the middle class aspiring to upper-middle status (like accountants). Thus a tie covered with tiny caduceuses proclaims 'Hot damn! I am a physician.' Any of these milieu ties can be alternated with the 'silk rep' model striped with the presumed colors of British (never, never German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or White Russian) regiments, clubs, or universities.”
It's easy to see that Fussell revels in his snippiness, which is intended for humorous effect. But beneath the author's sarcasm, as well as nestled among Molloy's relentless statistical onslaught, is a message professional types ignore at their peril: The point, as Molloy puts it succinctly, is that “Clothing should be used as a tool and as a weapon.”
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