Dress Codes

 I admit, I'm an artsy type, so I know much of this only second-hand, but my impression is:

In the 1990's, many offices started the practice of Casual Friday, when things such as chinos and polo shirts were accepted in the office on Fridays, in places where everyone had previously had to wear suits. 

Different places had different policies concerning socks. Massive honkin' triceps were optional.

Whether it was acceptable not to tuck the polo shirt into the chinos before casual wear was okay any day of the week, or the other way around, I don't know, but I do know that things have become more and more casual in many offices, to the point where in many cases there are no longer any dress codes, and it would seem strange to waste any time enforcing dress codes or objecting to what someone chose to wear to work.

In many offices, none of the above-described changes have happened yet. Some workplaces have progressed only to the point of Casual Friday with the Lacoste tucked in and the belt matching the shoes and by God you better wear socks, and some have no Casual Fridays.

And, of course, this is all a white-collar phenomenon. It doesn't apply to blue-collar work. 

A completely different essay describing the time when white-collar workers actually wore white collars and blue-collar workers actually wore blue collars, could be very interesting.

Is the line between white-collar and blue-collar actually beginning to blur? Are there now jobs which are neither 100% the one or the other? I don't know.  If there are such jobs, that would sound like progress to me. It would sound as if some parts of the world were finally beginning to be allowed to see what some other parts were up to.

I was about to write that many places do not have official dress codes, but that conformity is fairly rigidly enforced by peer pressure alone, and I was about to mention the US Congress as an example. But I googled it first. Turns out they do have a dress code, and that Senator John Fetterman, wearing a hoodie and shorts these days, votes from a cloakroom adjacent to the Senate floor, not from the floor of the Senate. Also, you remember all that nonsensical outrage about Michelle Obama going sleeveless? The Congressional dress code calls for sleeves.

What is Congress actually able to do if someone violates the dress code? Is the more important question not what they can do about, but what they are likely to do about it? I mean, Fox News and the New York Post are certainly doing their upmost to stir up outrage about Senator Fetterman's hoodie and shorts, but I'd be surprised if the Senate actually took even symbolic official action against him. The guy's just out of the hospital fachrissakes.

At this point, at the very latest, some extremely progressive, but simultaneously traditionally-minded fashion-focused readers are going into tirades about the beauties of traditional business attire.

And they're right. They're right exactly as far as they own wardrobes, and no further. See, the thing is, about Casual Friday, and about abandoning dress codes altogether and officially giving your blessing to anyone dressing however they Damn well please, is, that you can still wear immaculately fabulous business suits every day, even on Fridays, because that is the whole point: you don't tell anyone that they're not dressed correctly, and they return that courtesy. You can try to keep those beautiful habits of dress alive, but you're going to have to do it on the strength of the actual beauty of the clothes. You can persuade with beauty, when dress codes are no longer there. You can no longer coerce. 

I don't hang out much in places on social media -- or for that matter, in the meat world -- where people love suits, and suits are the main topic of discussion. But they still come up every now and then. For example, when people debate whether or not it is "correct" to wear a G-Shock in the office. I myself am so far from being table to take that question seriously, that I can't even write it without quote around the word "correct."

But there are people, they still do exist, who take such things very seriously. People who are actually horrified when some wears a G-Shock with a suit. In my opinion, anyone who is horrified by that is INCAPABLE of serious thought. Well. People disagree about such things. Hopefully we can still discuss them, with respect and goodwill for all

In my opinion, there are only bad reasons for insisting that everyone in the office wear a suit (or for example, insisting that every student in the school wear a uniform). If you can get them all to dress alike, more than a century before Thorstein Veblen first pointed out how conformity of dress helps to enforce conformity in other things, it will be much easier to keep them from objecting if the firm lies, or steals, or dumps poison into the air or water, or promotes a culture of predation or hatred against its female employees or its employees of color, etc.

The Right Watch

Some people -- who seem to be real old-money -- say that a man either should not wear a watch when wearing a tuxedo; or he should wear a simple 18 karat yellow gold dress watch with a white enamel face and no second hand, on an unobtrusive black leather strap.

Clearly, a lot of people either never heard the rules or are intentionally breaking them. Almost all of the male movie stars at the Oscars, and a few of the ladies, wear tuxedos. How many of them break the rule about the watch? Just about all of them, I think, or at least all of them who wear watches. I googled George Clooney because I thought he might have accidentally overheard the rule around 2005 or so. He's either never heard the rule, or he defies it.

George Clooney broke the rule AT HIS WEDDING.

I don't know whether James Bond has ever followed that rule.

And so maybe those old-money people, when they see video of movie stars in tuxedos with glaringly incorrect watches, over and over. And they sigh, "Oh well, movie stars just aren't our sort of people! Still"

Or -- maybe most old-money people have HEARD of the rule: either no watch or plain gold watch on black strap with tuxedo -- but, like many of the rest of us, they don't CARE much about following those old rules, and are sort of worried about their friends and relatives who still do, obsessively.

Fashion rules like the "correct' watch to wear with a tux, are useful in EXCLUDING people: one quick glance and you can see they don't belong to your class. They're a code, like a secret handshake.

What I'm unsure about is what present-day old money thinks about these rules. Are they clinging to them as snugly as ever, and do I know few or actually none of their names?

Or are they, quite frankly, attempting to broaden the gene pool?

I was about to say that Prince Harry had made a good health choice when he married an African-American, Meagan Markle, but I googled Meagan Markle first, and sure enough, Princess Meagan, one of America's most very white African-Americans --- is a direct descendant of King Henry III of England.

Wearing More Than One Watch at a Time

The are records of wrist watches having been made as long ago as the late 18th century, and, more likely than not, at some point early in their existence, some people began wearing more than one wristwatch at a time, for fashion reasons or other reasons.

However, the earliest instance of this I have been able to find (keep in mind, I haven't been looking for very long yet) is General Norman Schwarzkopf wearing a watch on either wrist beginning in 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War. Schwarzkopf had one watch set to Baghdad time, the other to Washington, DC time. Since then, wearing two (or more) watches at once has been known in some circles as "doing the Schwarzkopf." Buzz Aldrin, Fidel Castro and Ted Cruz have all been seen doing the Schwarzkopf. I have not yet been able to find any records of Schwarzkopf having asked any of them to stop.

I have done a little bit of searching in online discussion groups devoted to watches where people have asked whether it's okay to wear more than one watch at a time, or whether people will think it looks stupid or what have you. The responses I've seen so far have been overwhelmingly positive, saying, yeah, you be you, wear as many as you want to. Keep in mind, however, that some of the participants in such discussion groups are watch dealers, and that some watch dealers might figure that the more watches someone wears at one time, the more watches they are likely to purchase, and so, they might sometimes encourage wearing more than one watch at a time even if they think it looks really, really stupid.

One comment in one of these discussions said that, although he personally found nothing at all wrong with it, for every one person encouraging you to wear as many watches as you want to, there might be as many as ten judgemental jerks who would question not only your fashion sense, but also your personal and professional competence, if they spotted you wearing more than one watch at a time. My reaction to that is that it seems that the person making the comment might have a bad job where he is surrounded by judgemental creeps, and might be much happier if he made a drastic change to, for instance, a situation where he could wear a whole bunch of watches at once and the people around him would think it was great. One thing I'm absolutely sure about is that the reaction you will get by wearing more than one watch at once will vary greatly according to the kind of people with whom you surround yourself.

In a similar vein: in the course of researching this post, I came across an online article discussing weather a man should wear a watch at all. The author said yes, and he said yes for reasons having to do with peer pressure (also known as fashion) -- he asserted, for example, that nothing looks more desperate than a man fumbling for his cell phone in order to check the time.

It all depends on your point of view: to me, few things seem more desperate and insecure than someone who would worry about others judging him because he used his cell phone to check the time.

I'm so glad that, back in the 1980's, I came across that interview with Cormac McCarthy in which he declared that you have cleared one of the major hurdles in life when you have ceased to worry about what other people think of you. That's solid-gold advice.

Regular readers of this blog know that my position is that the only sensible reason to wear a watch in our present age is because you want to, not because you want to impress anyone else but because you like the watch in question.

Or the watches in question. Maybe you've gotten a new watch recently and you've been wearing the new one, but you starting missing wearing the one you wore previously, so now you wear them both. I say: good for you! Wear a watch on either wrist if you want to. Wear two watches on each wrist if you want to. I am decidedly, emphatically, firmly in the You Be You camp, and I have never sold a watch, and I also have no plans to do so.

I don't follow fashion closely. It was not until I started researching this post -- I started doing that yesterday -- that I discovered that some people who write about ladies' fashion for a living have encouraged ladies to wear more than one watch on a wrist since the early 2010's.

One of the most distinguished writers about men's watches recently wrote a column which began with the assertion that smartwatches really are watches. It wouldn't have occurred to me to argue otherwise, but apparently it has occurred to some people who interact with this particular writer. In any case, it seems to me that the rest of this particular column undercut the point with which it began, because it was all about wearing a conventional watch on one wrist and a smartwatch on the other -- as if there actually were a crucial difference.

My position would be, wear a mechanical watch (or two or three) on each wrist, and carry a few pocket watches in your pockets -- mechanical pockets watches, of course! -- and do the smart watch stuff on your phone. But it's not as if huge crowds of people have been clamoring for my opinion about this sort of thing. Well, maybe after I publish this post.

Maybe you have far, far more interesting things on your mind than watches and are a far wiser person than I.

I think the Trainman in The Marix Revolutions wore about 10 watches on each wrist. But does anybody really know how many it was?