Maybe the clothes don't make the man

My journey to the dark side is now complete.

Last week I picked up two pair of dress pants from the catalog department of a local department store to replace two pair of worn-out Dockers I bought when I joined the law firm.

Now I have a week's worth of dress pants and just more than a week's worth of dress shirts hanging in my closet, a slow accumulation from purchases during the last 11 months.

I bought all this stuff because my boss thinks that you're more likely to produce professional work if you dress professionally. To that I say, pish tosh.

You see, we dress in business casual -- dress shirt, slacks, nicer shoes. No ties, no suit coats/blazers, though the lawyers are supposed to have those items handy in case they are going to meet a client. And on Fridays, we can wear jeans and athletic shoes.

I doubt you could demonstrate that productivity is less on Fridays than the rest of the week, and that if we do show a dip it's more related to the way we dress than it being Friday and we're ready for the weekend.

I'm doing the same kind of work as I did at the newspaper, where I dressed Friday casual all the time, and the boll weevil foundation, where the concept was that we dressed at the level of our clients, i.e., cotton farmers.

Curiously, whenever we were going to have a board meeting at the foundation, staff were expected to dress up -- you know, professionally. The board members, most of whom were cotton farmers, dressed like, well, cotton farmers.

If a state ag or USDA official was expected, then you'd see senior staff wearing ties, though the rest of us didn't have to follow suit because we'd be tucked away out of sight.

I never noticed any real change in efficiency or ability that came about because of a change of clothes. Of course, this isn't research, only anecdotal evidence.

But what constitutes professional dress? Plumbers don't wear suits and ties, and athletes don't wear jeans and work shirts. Clowns wear parodies of normal clothing. Doesn't make them any less professional.

I've known all sorts of workers who dress "professionally" according to whatever standard that is in their vocation who are incompetent, and workers who dress like bums who can work circles around their professionally clad co-workers.

Sure, for some people, dressing a certain way puts them in a frame of mind, but it's the frame of mind that counts, not the clothes. What's that saying about lipstick and pigs?

But the clothes are a requirement of the job, and they're comfortable enough. But when I come home, the lipstick comes off.