Trousers speak louder than words
The ‘geeks in jeans’ trope is dull and false.
Here’s a question for you. That meeting you were in yesterday. Can you remember what the person who you reacted most strongly to was wearing?
I ask because something has gone unsaid for too long. Your clothes might be disturbing the fabric of modern professional life as we know it.
Before I go any further with this, it’s worth making a couple of things clear. I’m not handing out fashion tips here. I often dress in the dark. A former colleague and dear friend of mine laughed daily at my unironed shirts. Insofar as I have a professional style at all, I would describe it as ‘Flat White’.
I will unavoidably put a male slant on this post. There’s an interesting piece about the subtle interplay of clothes, psychology and professional environments for women. Buying clothes for my fiancée on a couple of occasions does not qualify me to write it. I would love it if somebody did.
I’m a fan of The Register. It works hard to make boring topics less so. I’ve always been amused that most of their stories referring to the Government Digital Service (GDS) mention jeans. Again. And again. So does the BBC. At least twice. You’d be forgiven for thinking the D stands for denim.
It would be easy to dismiss this horseplay as just more media outlets in the pocket of Big Corduroy. But this goes well beyond the borders of GDS. I think there’s some more interesting psychology going on.
When I started my first proper private sector job, it began with two weeks of induction training. My strongest memory was of the course leader — a deeply insecure man with the brash shit-talk of a mid-ranking Apprentice candidate — declaiming on first impressions.
“We charge you out to clients at £1,000 a day. You need to look like you’re worth that. Go out and buy yourself some nice suits. Shiny shoes.”
After joining the public sector, friends in the business world would describe civil service sartorial choices in damning terms. There were no departmental variations in this — other than perhaps for the Treasury, where there always seemed to be a fad for sackcloth and ashes — just a perceived sense of widespread slovenliness. In turn, this sometimes led to their perception that public servants were sloppy.
For what it’s worth, I disagree with this. There’s a style versus substance question underlying some of this tension. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that clothes matter to a lot of people and influence judgments of importance. Why?
Because it’s debatable whether clothes have any special influence on productivity over time. Perhaps an overtied tie can restrict oxygen flow to the brain. But if this is what’s holding back your organisation, frankly, you’ve got bigger problems.
What we wear is one of the few choices we all make on a daily basis. Even if you’re like me and don’t actively consider what you wear to work, that passivity is still a choice. You have chosen, consciously or otherwise, not to prioritise thinking about it. You spend that time on something else.
Beyond first impressions, the only time I notice what someone is wearing is if it deviates from the norm — either from the norm they have defined for themselves, or the one of the tribe they belong to. That is to say, I’ll notice if they have clearly made some sort of choice to look different today (and that choice might actually be ‘I couldn’t be bothered to wash my standard work rotation stuff on Sunday night, so here’s my third division emergency shirt’). What you wear, whether you acknowledge it or not, is a choice that is likely to have a psychological impact on others.
The language of clothing is a powerful heuristic. It’s something our brains use to save time. And that’s interesting because brains are often unreliable. Daniel Kahneman explains this in Thinking Fast and Slow. For my purposes, it’s enough to say that if I see somebody wearing their normal work clothes and an eyepatch — even if I’m fully aware they have just been for an operation on their eye — I’m going to start thinking about parrots and pieces of eight.
And this is where we come back to those jeans-wearing digital evangelists. Whatever the scenario, professional or otherwise, there will be a set of customs that define what is typical in terms of clothing. Observing those customs — like you might visiting a predominantly Muslim country on holiday, for example — is a form of acknowledging they exist, and showing respect and politeness. Ignoring them or subverting them is, conversely, making an equally clear statement.
Workplaces have customs too. There are many occasions where subverting those customs is absolutely the right thing to do. For example, in recent years, I haven’t worn a tie for job interviews. By making that choice, what I’m saying is (and you should imagine this being said in the voice of Mark Corrigan from Peep Show):
‘I’m a tieless maverick — do you want this hellfire unleashed on your organisation? Do you?’
If their answer is yes, then great. If not, then I’d probably be unhappy there anyway. Not incidentally, this reveals my tie bias; an item of clothing that for me comes with an unavoidable backing track of Huey Lewis and the News.
The second worst crime against fashion is being in denial that you’re wearing something that sends a clear signal in some way or another.
But the worst crime against fashion is taking signals from others at face value. Doing so is lazy or deliberate failure to pick through the tribalism and understand the individual motivations lying beneath. Not every denim wearer is a digital evangelist. Not every suit is an old school reactionary.
@ad_greenway
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