You are aware that context matters, yes? And that looking respectable doesn’t mean being respectable?
Wearing ripped jeans to a protest is appropriate. Wearing a tie to court is appropriate. Your comparison is apples vs. oranges.
But “respectable,” I think, is not so much about adherence to uniform standards as consideration for those around you. Nobody wants to sit next to your gnarly fungus toenails on a plane for five hours. Nobody wants to see your sweaty ass crack pulsating next to their $100 entrée. Nobody wants to smell your tequila farts on a crowded elevator. Making everyone around you put up with those things is grossly selfish and antisocial. We’re trying to have a civilization here.
All of those things can be achieved with lots of options and variations for non-formal clothing and just holding a fart for a minute or two. Why should our most “respectable” attire be so expensive? I say it’s entirely socioeconomic posturing of little to no value. I value my personal comfort far more than I value people looking at me and being impressed by a $2200 Armani suit. I’d much rather people value me for what I say and do. Not how I appear out in public as long as I’m not making a nuisance with how I dress.
In nearly all cases my philosophy is: If someone’s going to write me off for wearing jeans and a t-shirt, then they aren’t really worth interacting with. They can’t even bother to get to know me. I’m not going to spend a ton of money and effort on social lube that’s restrictive and uncomfortable to me, unless there’s a specific and important reason.
ETA: Sorry, I skipped over your first point.
Yes, it’s apples to oranges contextually. But I stand by my case that you shouldn’t have to show up to court in someone else’s dress code. As long as your ass isn’t hanging out, and you’re not in a cloud of smoke or something, then it shouldn’t matter.
What if I have an ugly face? Should I get plastic surgery and wear makeup in order to conform to someone else’s idea of “respectability”?
Money and style are not concomitant. Yes, anyone writing you off for wearing a t-shirt is probably not worth dealing with, but if they’re writing you off for unironically wearing a Matchbox 20 t-shirt they may be on to something.
How you dress is not simply adhering to someone else’s expectations, it’s a sign of respect. If J. Random Asshole is not worthy of respect, or you for whatever reason don’t need to give a shit, go ahead and wear that Borat mankini. Wear those fucking flip-flops to dinner. But know what you’re doing. Putting your own comfort ahead of everyone else’s most often tends to be a dick move; those can be cool if well-considered “fuck all y’alls” but usually they‘re not and usually you don’t have the juice to pull it off.
ETA: If you have an “ugly” face you should sport that thing as boldly as possible. I know it’s a cliché we tell pubescent kids in their awkward stage, but ugly is on the inside.
Seriously, do a vivisection, that shit is disgusting.
Perhaps working the nightshift has gotten to me a little.
I literally have zero fucks to give whether someone thinks I am or am not attractive. Wearing enough clothes to have the basic level of courtesy is easy enough. Beyond that, if I’m going to dress up, it’s for me, and not anyone else.
But I guess if I were living during the day I might have a chance at caring more what other people thought. For the last several years I only see people face to face occasionally, usually while they’re leaving to go home. The rest is entirely over the phone. I do all the regular hygene stuff, shower, shave, teeth brushing, all that crap, I don’t smell. Why should I take extra effort beyond being clean and sheltered from the elements?
As you see, I live a mostly a-social lifestyle, which I admit has been warping my mind to an extent.
Why do women wear fancy lingerie when they’re not going on a date? Why do you put on aftershave that no one but you is going to smell? Why do you wipe your ass even if you’re wearing brown underwear?
The effort may be nothing more than ritual ablutions, but maybe there’s something to be said for ritual ablutions.
Heh, now you’re starting to sound like @popobawa4u >_<
I’m not into ritual without utility. I was forced to do that for many years as a child, and now try to make my rituals evidently useful, or otherwise excise them from my routine.
I’m not against looking “nice” if it makes one feel nice. It just isn’t something I’ve ever felt, so I don’t do it if I can help it, and don’t spend time judging people’s appearance (insofar as it’s possible), because I don’t want to be judged for that either. If someone’s ass is hanging out, and it bothers me (I’d probably not even notice, because I trained myself in high school not to look at people. Because it gets you beaten up if some neanderthal jock notices you looking at his girlfriend, or looking at him), I’ll go somewhere else, or not look at it. I can’t control them, and it’s going to insult them if I tell them to cover up, and I don’t have the authority to do that anyway.
I used to tease a friend who fancied himself a biker (the kind on a Harley, not the actually masculine kind) about spending all his free time wearing assless chaps. Until he pointed out to me that there isn’t actually any other kind of chaps.
I honestly wish this was the norm. Dress codes have always seemed to me somewhere between societal control and mass delusion, ranging from the hideous (neckties) to the hideous and debilitating (high-heeled shoes). You should wear your clothes because you want to, not because other people expect it.
Think what you want, but denial does not reality make. If you show up for a white collar job wearing sagging pants and a wife beater you will not be successful. That’s just the way it is. I work in stained jeans and ripped T’s, but I work alone with my hands. When I see clients I put on clean pants and a shirt with buttons. But the culture of my business does not include jackets and ties, except as affectations. Acceptable business attire isn’t “being like the people who fucked the future” any more than living in a house is. That vermin use the camouflage of respectable appearance doesn’t make the respectable appearing vermin.
With family coast to coast and of different generations, I see great disparity at things like religious services and weddings. In N CA or OR showing up to an outdoor wedding in sandals and shorts is just fine. But my mother is horrified if I want to attend services in her un-air conditioned congregation wearing no jacket and tie as I would my own. But they’re mostly geriatric. And have no control over my life.
And I think you shouldn’t confuse the way things are with the way things should be. Tradition requires constant reexamination to ensure timely obsolescence. Otherwise, your culture is just carrying a meaningless, oppressive dead weight.
Clothes don’t make respectability (whatever that word even means). In fact, trying to determine personal qualities by what someone is wearing is the essence of prejudice. Couple that with residual (or quite-a-bit-more-than residual) bigotry, and you get something like what’s described in the article.
Of course there’s no doubt fashion is a moving target, what we call academic robes were the height of fashion in the 13th century. But it’s a usually slowly moving target. For thousands of years until not long ago you weren’t dressed without a hat. It’s a riot in Game of Thones that no one in the North wears hat in a snowstorm.
I don’t mean to offend, but protesting that you shouldn’t be judged by your dress, appearance or accent is naive and juvenile. It’s one of civilization’s oldest games, how to separate people by class. You can still win as a “crass” outsider, but your odds are much longer. Sadly this is what drives so many kids to think they can be sports or entertainment stars, because THEY didn’t have to “suck up to the man”.
Yes this. Since I have been in IT for over 20 years now where the dress code is definitely lax, I have seen people (management included) who like to do the jacket and tie every day and some who are totally jeans and t-shirt all the time but I will say it has always been clean presentable dress that matters over what exactly the clothes are. I personally of late have been partial to jeans and a button shirt as I like that for everyday wear at the office and such.
Though if I ever am able to get back to the telecommute thing it will be probably be back to working in my jammies till lunch time.
You do realize that’s an extremely shit way to live, right? Separating people into “us” and “them” is responsible for the greater part of human misery. It’s at the core of sexism, racism, classicism, homophobia, antisemitism, and all sorts of other nastiness.
You may call the alternative “naive”, but accepting the status quo, regardless of utility, strikes me as remarkably selfish.
The ability to navigate social norms often reflects your ability to do your job, as that navigation may be part of the job. Sure, no one has qualms about a software engineer or a welder rolling into work wearing whatever they slept in, but for occupations that require interaction with people who care about appearances, you better take that into account or you are bad at that job. There’s a reason why even “maverick” lawyers wear suits to court — maybe it’s purple seersucker with a bolo tie, but it’s a suit because judges get pissed off otherwise. The law-talking-guy job is to represent clients effectively, not to wave personal freak flags. If that’s such a sticking point, be a coder or a welder or Lady Gaga instead.
Repeating your replies about “girls” suggests to me that you either don’t understand sexism, or disagree with it for reasons you aren’t articulating.
The native norms of the area would be Lenape.
An image search can show how such clothing appears.
Where and when do we get to vote on that? There have been explicit ethnocentric strategies for pushing a European view of the world, it would be naive to assume or suggest otherwise when it is easy enough to research. It would be bad enough for any institution, but for an ostensibly educational one, I think promoting Eurocentrism as normal is dangerously ignorant. It directly says that being European is what makes one appear to be respectable. A Chinese emperor would be dismissed because they were unable to match the refined standards of NJ preppies, which is rather twisted.
How about their weirdly ambiguous distinction between “logos” versus “corporate symbols”? I am going to assume that they are well aware that logo graphics are precisely corporate symbols, and are merely playing some vague semantic games rather than more precisely codifying what they prefer.
Might this not be presupposing that separating people by class is not itself naive and/or juvenile? How can rational people judge anything which they don’t really know about, such as strangers? If one finds it useful to classify people, why would they do so on a merely aesthetic, rather than functional basis?
You idealists can sing “imagine” all you want. I won’t deny the world we live in is racist, classist, sexist, and biased in lord knows how many more ways. I’m not thrilled with it either, but that’s the current reality. And yes, you wont get a job at a fortune 500 company wearing a robe of any sort, whether you’re a Chinese emperor or a sheik. If you want to participate in the system, you have to play. You can’t even flip burgers wearing sagging pants and a wife beater to show off your tats.
??
Is it now not OK to call adolescent females “girls”? I didn’t get the memo. And the revolution I mentioned would be by the “young women” if you tried to make them wear jackets and ties.
