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There are plenty of ways to "beat the heat" without looking like a slob or lowering standards of professional appearance.

I have worked in offices that insisted upon strict business formal attire, that have accepted business casual attire, and that have allowed employees to wear genuinely casual attire. From this, I can report that the clothes my co-workers were allowed to wear never had the slightest correlation to the quality of their work, positive or negative.

SJE is pretty much on the mark with the "peacock" analogy. We deem certain clothes to be "professional" and "attractive" solely because we wouldn't wear them for any practical reason -- otherwise, people would wear them without a dress code. It's a way of showing off one's social status and willingness to submit to authority, nothing more. (Yes, I have worked with a lot of scientific and technical people; why do you ask?)

That said, I can't imagine the lawyer- and bureaucrat-driven culture of DC is ready to assess the quality and value of people's work without taking into their skill at wearing impractical and over-warm clothing, so we should probably push for office showers instead. But in an ideal world we wouldn't be having this conversation, because nobody would believe that wearing an outfit of a clean t-shirt, shorts, and sandals would render someone unfit to engage in the upper-middle class professions.

by cminus on Jun 20, 2012 8:34 pm • link • report

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