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What to wear? What to wear?
Schoolkids are getting back into uniform, the business world is getting out of uniform, the Supreme Court says putting a postage stamp on your privates will make you decent, and the daughters of all those hippie bra burners are cleaning the clunky corporate clothes out of their closets and slinking into something small.
It's a schmatte world turned topsy-turvy. It's several social pendulums swinging in different directions at once. And it's getting hard to know what to put your legs through in the morning.
So why don't we all get down to our skivvies, take a deep breath, and try to figure out what in this Tower of Apparel Babel makes sense.
STRATEGIC PLACEMENT.
Let's start with the easy one: kids. The conservative trend toward making schoolchildren all dress alike solves more problems than a year's supply of Ritalin. No longer do parents have to listen to some badgering moppet whine about not having cool clothes. Teachers don't have to put up with the slovenly, the risqué, or the distracting. And youngsters don't have to subject themselves to ridicule because of their mother's Kmart tastes.
Nude dancers are sort of in the same boat with this Brat Pack. The Supreme Court says that they, too, can be forced to wear something they don't want by municipalities. In this case, however, it's not navy-blue blazers and plaid jumpers but patches of material, lovingly known as pasties and G-strings. The court based its ruling on a close reading of the Second Amendment. A majority of the justices found that while every American has the right to bare arms and legs, the so-called Marilyn Monroe Doctrine does not extend to every other bodily part.
Well, that seems sensible. Although the dissenting minority had a good point when they wrote that a better reason to allow local governments to require tassels and small, shiny triangles in strategic places is that such accoutrements do, in fact, make the dancers look a lot hotter.
UPLIFTED.
Yet while the fogies in black robes seem to be in favor of dressing up, the fogies in the business world are all dressing down. Presumably, the thinking is that if you walk like the New Economy and dress loose like the New Economy, people will never guess that you're a fiftysomething corporate lifer mired in the Old Economy. So suddenly, companies and law firms are instituting five-day-a-week casual-dress codes, venerable haberdashers like Paul Stuart are howling, and gray-haired suits are showing up for work in red sweaters and khakis.
It's hard to know where it'll all end, but one can only hope that this trend winds up in that cul-de-sac of social behavior where we dropped off our wide ties, bell bottoms, and leisure suits. As someone who didn't dress for success for the first 20 years of my worklife, I never thought I'd be saying this, but there's something unnerving about showing show up at a pricey law firm and finding your legal adviser traipsing around in Dockers.
On the other hand, it's hard not to feel uplifted about the Erin Brockovich Effect that is leading women in the workplace to use whatever they have to get wherever they're going. We're talking minis, spike heels, Wonderbras, and leopard prints. "Hoo-hah!" as Al Pacino's character said in Scent of a Woman. If this is a fixed feature of the new rag rage, it just might be worth putting up with a bunch of ambulance-chasers in overalls.
Scotti, Business Week senior editor for government and sports business, offers his views every week for BW Online EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
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