Last night, I participated in a text exchange with a group of dear friends from Our First Real Job after college. It didn't start as a conversation reminiscing about what we wore to the office back in the olden days, but that's how it ended.
Due to the pandemic and technology, two of them are working strictly from home where the dress code is business casual from the waist up and anything goes from the waist down, beyond the eye of the digital camera. One friend remarked on how she started her career in suits with skirts, slacks, and blazers, and she will end it in sweatpants.
Forty years ago, if you wore sweatpants to work, you were a gym teacher!
The torture--I mean "memory"--of wearing a business suit, especially a skirted one, is seared into my brain. An itchy wool or synthetic-blend exterior with a slick taffeta lining. The slightly gritty sound made by pulling up the skirt over my pantyhose-clad legs. An all-around tuck of the tails of a polyester blouse, followed by a sharp suck-in of breath to button the waistband in the back. Finally, a swish of the zipper to create pure misery and suffering, only to be amplified by squeezing my arms into a taffeta-lined blazer. Needed a lot of anti-perspirant in those days, plus a good dry cleaner to get rid of the pit stains.
Dressed in that office armor, no wonder my hot flashes actually started in my twenties! It was Steam City, even in the winter. Also, deformities in my feet can be traced back to stuffing them into high-heeled pumps, the crippling footwear of those years of yore. I can remember arriving home and sitting on the edge of the bed, extracting my poor swollen toes from shoe prison, then my varicose-vein wrapped legs from the pinch of pantyhose. Some days that included peeling a hardened spot of White-Out which had been hastily applied to curtail an under-the-skirt stocking run.
Did we women really have to do all that to show the men that we were to be taken seriously in the business world? I haven't even mentioned hair and makeup! Bags, jewelry, and other accessories! It was costly and frustrating to shop for all of that stuff, and it was a daily challenge to put ourselves together and wear something different than the day before. By Friday, it was just plain exhausting to me. Casual Fridays had not been invented yet, but even if they had been, some skank would have dialed it up to make sure the rest of us had to remain in costume.
Men got away with looking the same. It might have been a different food-stained tie a couple of times a week, but basically the same shirt, pants, jacket, and, most enviably, comfortable flat shoes. Also, a monthly haircut (for those that had hair). Don't get me started on the inequities then or now.
If my last job would have been work-at-home in sweatpants, I believe I would have stuck with it for a while longer. Although I did not have that option, I'm happy for all the women who are getting a break from the tyranny of what-to-wear, head to toe, to the office. Enjoy those sweatpants and flip-flops!
And I'm sorry you have to see men who are working from home in their stained polo shirts.... Not mentioning any names.
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