That freedom exists for women, not for men. In a professional setting, you can wear a pantsuit. You can wear a dress. You can wear a blouse and skirt. I can wear nothing but a suit (or, maybe, a combination of suit elements; e.g., a suit jacket with slacks that are not from that suit).Guinevere wrote:I come down somewhere between Andrew and rubato on the point. I think we are lucky to live in a time when there is quite a lot of freedom regarding how we dress, even in a professional setting ....
Your clothes can be any color you want. You can show up for work in black, blue, green, lavender, yellow, red ... whatever. Your clothes can have stripes of any width going in any direction, polka dots, etc. I have some color choices, but if I show up in a suit -- or even a shirt -- that has alternating black and white diagonal stripes (of equal width), that's "unprofessional". (Let alone my showing up in a yellow suit with black polka dots.)
You can wear something with a neckline that is actually at your neck, or you can wear something with a neckline considerably lower (within limits -- a breast-exposing plunge is probably unaccepted -- but still affording you considerable choice). I must wear a necktie, a garment which serves absolutely no useful purpose and should go the way of the codpiece.
You can wear earrings of just about any sort you like. I can probably get away with a stud or two (no more than one in each ear) and maybe even a minuscule hoop, but if I show up wearing an earring that actually has something -- anything -- hanging from it, that's "unprofessional".
And it's not just clothing. You can wear your hair cut Marine-Corps short or at the collar and just covering your ears or shoulder-length or down to your waist. If I wear my hair any longer than collar-length, that's "unprofessional". (You can also wear in your hair a bow or a comb or those things that look like knitting needles; I am not permitted to wear my hair long enough to accommodate any such thing.)
In short, women have "quite a lot of freedom regarding how [they] dress," but in professional settings, men have almost none.
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More fundamentally, the whole idea of "professional" dress is just bullshit. The substance of my work is the quality of my research, my analysis, and my articulation of positions and their bases. None of that has anything at all to do with what clothes I am wearing.
Many professionals work in circumstances where they rarely, if ever, encounter people other than their co-workers. Many accountants, for example, work in their offices and never see the people for whom they are providing accounting services. (For that matter, I have done work for people I've never even laid eyes on.) And that is true of many people in many different professions.
I use professionals to prepare my income tax forms. (I used to do my own, but the self-employment stuff is a pain in the ass, and I might miss something.) I couldn't care less whether the person doing my taxes does them while wearing a suit or wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt or bare-ass naked. Why should I?
And even when professionals do encounter their clients, so what? The whole "dress code" thing is nothing but mutually reinforcing stupidity: The lawyer dresses "professionally," because (s)he thinks that the client expects it; the client dresses "professionally," because (s)he things that the lawyer expects it. The lawyer and the client both know that the only correlation (which is not strong but does exist) between the quality of the work and the formality of the dress is inverse: Both would be able to focus better on the work if they weren't pulling at their collars to relieve throat constriction, struggling to avoid rearranging their breasts or genitals in the presence of the other person, and so forth.
But each continues to play the game, because each thinks that the other expects it -- that otherwise, each will think less of the other. And so the game goes on, to the benefit of no one except those who manufacture, tailor, and care for the garments.
The truth of the matter is pretty simple: Dressing "professionally" bears the same kind of relationship to actual professionalism as children's dress-up games bear to actual adulthood.
The idea that people should dress "professionally" makes no more sense than does the idea that lawyers should show up in court wearing powdered wigs. We've long since done away with the latter, and it is long past time for us to do away with the former.
