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Dressing up and dressing down

A couple of weeks ago I made my way to New York City for a dose of high culture – chamber music composed by musical saints such as Brahms and Beethoven, and performed in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center by some of the most accomplished musicians in the world.

The mere idea of doing such a thing assured me that I am cultivated, sophisticated, and a gentleman of considerable merit. Actually experiencing this marvel increased my self-esteem to a dangerously high level. Then as I entered the hall, something caught my eye that brought me crashing down.

Some of the audience were dressed in disgustingly inappropriate fashion – jeans, cargo pants, shorts, thong sandals – things like that. In Alice Tully Hall, yet. Showing up there dressed that way was an insult to the musicians and to the whole enterprise. It was like receiving a Nobel Prize in your underwear.

I think I know how this practice came to be. It arose out of misguided egalitarianism.

When I began college teaching 50 years ago, I eagerly donned the weed jacket and tie that were the professorial uniform. At the time, students dressed, well, like students: not in coat and tie, but not thumb-in-your-eye casual either.

My career was hardly begun before a tsunami of change washed over campuses nationwide. Colleges began fooling around with open-admissions programs. Course requirements were eliminated. Grade inflation was epidemic; suddenly, students were all above average. Professors ceased to be authority figures; student opinions were accorded equal validity with demonstrated fact.

Instead of standing behind lecterns to teach, we sat on top of the nearest table or walked up and down aisles, whatever we could think of to decrease the space – physical and metaphorical – between us and the students.

This rejection of authority that was basic to the counter-culture had its way with dress norms as with everything else. Faculty, including me, showed up to conduct the discussions that were replacing lectures in jeans, work shirts and sandals.

In time, hippies grew up and became bourgeois, but the tendency to devalue formal dress remains.

At the Anglo-Catholic church, St. Ignatius of Antioch in Manhattan, you can choke on the incense, it’s that thick at times. Holy water is consecrated by the gallon. Much of the Mass is in Latin. Just about every move anyone makes is carefully choreographed. The place and the moment are suffused with a sense of holiness. And yet some people approach the communion rail wearing ball caps and shorts and with boobs on display like in a disco circa 1973.

The casual Fridays at the office that were so welcome a decade or two back have pretty much ceased to be necessary. It may be time to institute business-attire Fridays. If you showed up for work at a tech company wearing traditional corporate drag, you’d probably be sent home to change into something less highfalutin.

Last month I saw a woman get on an airplane wearing a bikini covered only by a gauzy see-through illusion.

All is not lost, though; authority and hierarchy are still valued in some endeavors. Police and members of the military show their rank by what they wear (and nobody gets to wear just whatever they like). Ministers wear vestments. Judges wear robes. Television news reporters usually dress somewhat formally. School children wear uniforms or otherwise submit to certain rules. And – this I can’t make sense of – basketball coaches come to games dressed like bankers.

Military organizations not only have no reluctance to assign authority in varying degrees; military effectiveness is based on it. Rank is obvious; one of lower rank must salute (a Western version of the kowtow) one of higher rank. When a member of a military organization runs afoul of a regulation such that their rank is reduced, their uniform is altered to reflect the lower rank; they are dressed down.

My father was a case study in dressing up. He was a dandy. I think it came from having enjoyed upper-middle-class status as a child and then being knocked down by circumstances and turned into a pipefitter.

He went to work each morning wearing khakis, steel-toe safety shoes and a hard hat. He didn’t like being that person. But on weekends, he would put on a stylish suit and good dress shoes – he especially loved nice shoes – and he became the person he had been before the Depression. He would dress up. He would put on clothes that indicated elevated social status.

From one way of looking at it, he was the same person whether he was wearing work clothes or a suit. But not exactly. Putting on a suit turned him into a person with more self-esteem: it may also have changed him in more fundamental ways. Increasingly, scientific studies are showing that dressing more formally has a biological effect; it increases the ability to think abstractly, which aids creativity and long-term strategizing. (When the tech companies find this out, I expect they’ll revert to business attire.)

Maybe those people I saw at Lincoln Center in beach wear had bad military experiences that they were trying to put behind them by flouting dress conventions. Maybe they’re still living partly in the age of Aquarius. Maybe there is some explanation that I can’t imagine.

Whatever the case, count me as favoring special dress for special occasions.

Paul Willcott publishes somewhat longer essays about once a month at www.geezerblockhead.com.

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