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Clothes Encounters
For companies toughing it out in tough times, ‘business-casual' may be going the way of the dodo
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CONNTACT.COM
10/14/2002
By: Elizabeth Linden
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Each morning around 7 a.m., Elizabeth Quadros crawls out of bed, takes a shower, and puts on the clothes she carefully laid out for herself the night before.
One of a new crop of analysts working at J.P. Morgan in New York, Quadros takes no liberties with the company-wide dress code. "People don't take you as seriously, the more casual you look," she explains.
For Quadros, an appropriate outfit is some permutation of slacks or a skirt with a nice dress shirt or sweater set.
J.P. Morgan has had a dress code of business casual as long as she has worked there. Company policy for women's dress explicitly prohibits exposed shoulders, sandals and shorts.
And though soon the code may be changing for Quadros, the regulations keeping the dress conservative will not. "Before we were business-casual, but now the word on the street is that we might be going business-formal again."
While the rules for corporate dress may seem at times arbitrary, when a professional looking shoe or shirt may be deemed inappropriate because of an exposed toe or peeking shoulder, Quadros is quick to assert that the conservatism of a dress code is rooted in important business considerations.
"Right now the stress is on a return to values," she notes. "And dress reflects that."
Further, for Quadros, distinctions between business-casual and business-formal codes are equally serious. "Back in the beginning of the Internet boom and tech boom, when we were still business-formal, clients who had all the power would show up to meetings in ripped jeans and T-shirts," she recalls.
"We looked like tools if we wore suits, so they changed it to business-casual," says Quadros. "Now, as the power is shifting, the suit is coming back into play."
Quadros relates a recent situation in which she went to a meeting with her boss, both of them in slacks and dress shirts, after he assured her there would be no need to wear a suit. "Our clients walked in in suits and there we were. I made fun of him afterwards for that."
So for the moment, at least, with the Internet boom having gone bust, there has been a pronounced shift back to the power suits that asserted austere professionalism a few years earlier.
"Now, every time we have meetings with clients, I wear a suit," Quadros explains. "And in some ways, because I am young (22), and a woman, I have something to prove. If you walk into a room in your school clothes, people are going to think, 'Who is this kid?'"
It is also true that dress codes affect the genders differently. Andreas Small is a co-worker of Quadros', also a new analyst for J.P. Morgan, and like Quadros, he also received the handout at the beginning of their training with the company that detailed what he could and could not wear.
"But," Small says, "we didn't get the lecture on dressing non-provocatively."
Small finds that the dress code is not a burden for him, although he sees how it could be different for women.
"As a guy, you only need three pairs of pants and a few shirts that you can wash," he explains. "Women have to have matching sweaters and things. It is more expensive to dress up if you are a woman." Although ultimately, Small concludes, "I see little value in [the dress code] because I have never seen the opposite," he adds, "I don't think it is the clothes that make the man or woman."
Yet some would argue that as mainstream clothing trends become less and less conservative, and newcomers to the corporate scene are steeped in ever-greater numbers of images targeting their consumer bracket for ultra low-rise pants, Lycra muscle tees, miniskirts and obtrusive body piercing, dress codes are all the more necessary.
Quadros adds that there is an additional consideration in keeping the clothes you wear to work and the clothes you wear for play differentiated, explaining that a dress code is a way to "separate your work life from your casual life. It creates a focused environment."
The dress for young businesspeople working in New Haven seems to follow similar rules to that of the bigger companies of the Big Apple, although they may be less often formally stated as a condition of employment.
Meenah Kim, a 21-year-old intern working in real estate development for Yale University, explains that while she was never explicitly told what she could and could not wear, the lesson was immediate and intuitive.
"I went in for an interview and saw what other people were wearing," she recalls. "It was really common sense."
However, Kim adds: "For men it is so easy. They just wear a shirt and tie, while for women what is appropriate is a lot less clear."
Indeed, the grey area for women in professional dress can seem vast, and although in some cases that may mean a greater variety of sartorial choices available to the working woman, it also means greater potential to wear something deemed inappropriate in an office context.
As Kim explains: "You have to dress in a certain way to get respect. If you go walking around in what you want to wear, some frilly skirt or something, people will think, 'There goes the dumb blonde of the office.'"
Sam Brandao, an intern for a New Haven non-profit, agrees that more often appropriate dress is determined by what others in the office deem appropriate rather than a sense of personal security or professionalism that comes of wearing the right clothes.
"I had a variety of conflicting messages when I first got started," recalls Brandao. "My actual boss would always say, 'What if one of my board members came in here? You should probably look nice just in case.'
"On the other hand," says Brandao, "One of my fellow interns was a student and wore funky, casual clothes. My boss could never convince her she should dress up more so that finally, at one point, the company bought her some more boring clothes to go to a conference in. There were clearly days when dress was more important [than on other days]."
Like Kim's, Brandao's office does not have an official dress code. "I would usually wear slacks and a belt, a shirt with a collar," says Brandao. "When I felt the need to be particularly obsequious, I would wear a tie or a coat and a tie, although in reality if I was dressed up, it was because I was going out afterward."
While Kim and Brandao both see benefits in having a dress code for making expectations explicit, restrictions on how one can and cannot look in the in the workplace remain inherently distasteful for some.
Alexandra Johnson, 25, is a case in point.
"I wouldn't want to work in a place that stifled me and had so many restrictions on how I could look," she says. "Of course, there is tasteful and not-tasteful dress, but I wouldn't want to be told what to wear."
Johnson explains that working one summer in the office of a pharmaceutical company, she had a tongue piercing and it was never a problem. Ironically, it was once she stepped out of the business environment that she had problems with her jewelry.
"Recently, when I was working for a summer camp, I had a problem with my nose piercing," Johnson says. "The camp director asked me to take it out and I explained to him that for many people it is part of the culture and that I had had mine done in India. Regardless, I had to take it out."
It can often be outside the office that the rules of dress are most strictly respected. When recent Yale grad Andrew Osarchuk returned to campus for an interview with the career services staff about his ongoing job search, he had a brief clothing crisis.
"I wondered, 'Do I get dressed up for this?' The woman I was meeting was supposed to help me get a job, so maybe it was better to go looking like a poor schmoe," Osarchuk says. 'But also it seemed like maybe I needed to impress her with my employability."
And this, it seems, is dress-code anxiety at its most elemental, as the questions of confidence and seriousness play not only into success on the job, but also into access to work in the first place. So while those newly employed in the business world follow the rules, written or otherwise, as best they can, it is those others still looking for work in such offices that may feel the pressure to dress up most acutely.
Osarchuk concludes: "Ultimately I did get dressed up, although not necessarily for the counselor. In my suit I felt more confident, like a professional."
So, did he get the job? "Well, [the counselor] gave me some good advice, at least," Osarchuk says. "We'll have to wait and see what happens."
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