The article quotes “style commentator” Meghan Cleary, who sniffs that “Shoes convey the mood of a woman. Wearing flip-flops conveys the mood that you are relaxed and on vacation. That’s not a good message in the office.” She should know, right? After all, she wrote a book called The Perfect Fit: What Your Shoes Say About You, described by Publishers Weekly at amazon.com thusly:
“A woman’s favorite pair of shoes is actually a window into her soul. The type of shoe that a woman wears can indicate her taste in clothing, her career goals and even her ideal mate. This breezy, illustrated giftbook will entertain those who love both fashion and horoscopes, but know not to take either too seriously.”
Of course, that summary leads me to wonder how a foofy yet (supposedly) fun — and thus entirely disposable — book can be the basis of claiming that “shoes convey the mood of a woman.” If shoes have all the significance of a horoscope, then the point I’m eventually going to make is already conceded.
But if Ms. Cleary isn’t credible enough, how about Joanne Blake, president of corporate image consulting company Style for Success? “The more skin you show and the more noise you make,” she writes, “the more credibility you lose. Very seldom do you see men wearing sandals with their business wear. There’s a certain common sense that comes into play.” This, in an article at CanoeLive (http://lifewise.canoe.ca/Style/2005/08/23/1184886.html) in which she criticizes everyone from Northwestern University’s lacrosse team for meeting President Bush inappropriately wearing flip-flops (one dared to wear flip-flops with an Ann Taylor dress) to a bride who wants to wear flip-flops at her wedding, not in Hawaii, but in Edmonton.
Psychology Wears Prada
It’s fascinating, really, how people cling to the notion that clothes have special insight into a person’s personality when it’s really just fashion snobbery masquerading as wannabe psychological analyses. Where are the studies that show how the clothes make the person? Where’s the evidence that wearing a particular kind of shoe or piece of clothing is tied into a specific personality trait? What, in fact, does wearing a particular kind of clothes have to do with the ability to perform a job? Do bare feet lower IQs?
Of course, even these style gurus seem to implicitly acknowledge that it’s all about appearances. That old saying, “You can’t judge a book by its covers,” isn’t so easily dismissed. We’ve heard the tales of successful executives who started their corporate empires in jeans and bare feet. On the flip side, the late Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling seemed quite well dressed while they were busy steering Enron into scam-infested waters. In any case, it doesn’t really make any sense to believe that clothes are a reflection of personality when clothing styles are dictated by cultural standards. If the expected attire for men is a business suit, then men will wear suits not because it’s what they want to wear — which is a closer, though still limited, reflection of their “personablity” — but because that’s what they need to wear in order to meet the approval of the business. The same line of reasoning applies to flip-flops. Forget being comfortable in the clothes you’ll wear for most of the day. Don’t even worry about job performance too much. Just look like what people consider to be a professional, and people will assume that you really are a professional.
How to Be Like Everyone Else
This whole hoopla about dress standards is really about conformity. And the thing about conformity in Western culture is that, unlike the blatantly obvious conformity of, say, the Islamic requirement that women be entirely covered, it is Byzantine and subtle. Still, it reflects how tyrannical culture can be, even in the supposedly rugged individualism of the West. Telling people how to dress and presuming to know a person based on his or her clothing smacks of trying to remind people what their proper place is. It’s a denial of a person’s individuality. Even when cloaked in words like “showing respect” by “dressing properly,” it’s tyrannical because one person is expected to set aside his or her individuality for another’s sake. In other words, the “respect” is a one-way street.
Interestingly, an article over at Alternet (http://www.alternet.org/story/38613/) also examines the dictatorial tendencies of fashion, albeit in the realm of TV’s “makeover” reality shows. The author, Lakshmi Chaudhry, offers several interesting observations, but they all point to how dress standards, as established by style gurus, are really just a means of hijacking a person’s sense of self and dignity.
Ideally, it shouldn’t matter what people wear or don’t wear since clothing has no moral consequences. All that matters is how people behave and treat one another — and whether they get the work done. Reality, of course, isn’t like this, and unfortunately it means compromising by playing the appearances game. Still, kudos to those who wear what they want on their own terms. And to the culture tyrants, well, there are four-letter words other than “flip” and “flop” that might apply.