Comments on: Office Work It

By: Links On Clothes For People Who Are Ambivalent About Clothes | Lynley Stace

Links On Clothes For People Who Are Ambivalent About Clothes | Lynley Stace — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 03:21:42 +0000

[…] Office Work It from Bad Reputation, about how office uniforms (and pseudo-uniforms) brand employees in various […]

By: Bad Reputation: Office Work It |

Bad Reputation: Office Work It | — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:20:06 +0000

[…] first post is on officewear, hierarchies and how what we wear to work can make or break how we’re seen in the w…. I would love to hear your thoughts, and why not check out the rest of Bad Rep while you’re […]

By: Sinistre

Sinistre — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 15:32:00 +0000

I work in events. I work in a place where there is a sort-of uniform. Basically we need to be visible as staff so we can serve guests. we have to obey a colour scheme rather than a uniform and its different for males and females. Basically, men wear ties and trousers, women wear a scarf type thing.

My bosses are quite lenient about whether women wear dresses or trousers. It’s seen as a matter of choice about whether women want to wear flats or heels. Usually my bosses aren’t bothered if my colleagues wear a black dress instead of a white blouse, although some managers have pointed out if we don’t look consistent in our appearance (where the colour scheme comes in), guests won’t know we are all staff.

One notable thing about where I work is that most people who come as guests are in their own work situation or environment (in conferences etc) and so I get to see what is their work attire. One universal is that women are expected to wear high heels, and invariably if I’m doing cloakroom duty, they are in a lot of pain and have a pair of flats to go home. I’m getting the impression that they feel there is a pressure on them to wear high heeled shoes, or to be seen wearing them. Working in corporate events does make me see the highly gendered nature of our clothing. The thing that I find insufferable about it is how tacit it is. At least with somewhere like UBS they are explicit about the gendered rules. I find something comforting in being explicit about appearance against talking about people’s appearances behind their back etc.

By: Bad Reputation: Office Work It « the magic square foundation

Bad Reputation: Office Work It « the magic square foundation — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 12:51:25 +0000

By: Clare

Clare — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:34:17 +0000

I also meant to say that in a work place with very few other women, you have very few examples of acceptable ways to dress for work and you have to figure this all out on your own.

By: Clare

Clare — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:33:00 +0000

I think implicit dress codes are even more difficult to navigate in workplaces with a big gender disparity. I work in a massively male dominated field and the line between too dowdy and too slutty, where you get taken seriously, is in a very different place to an average workplace. I have worked in places where wearing any kind of skirt would have been considered provocative!
There is an effective uniform of jeans and shirt/t-shirt for men, but I am still struggling to find an equivilent which works for me and is not too figure huging or revealing and is also not a sack.

By: Kirsten / Hodge

Kirsten / Hodge — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:28:38 +0000

Nice piece and interesting points.

I think my office falls into a third possible category: very laid-back clothing-wise, but the women who are doing best and getting ahead tend to also wear elaborately put together ‘concept outfits’ (e.g. ‘Vivienne Westwood cowgirl’), complete with plentiful heels, makeup and accessories. There’s an element of objective enjoyment of fashion here (we’re a ‘creative bunch’ and we want to show that we understand the creative sector), but I also occasionally wonder if there’s an element of coercian too – if I have an external meeting, I always make sure I’m wearing heels or a skirt or something quite pointedly ‘fashion’, whereas on fridays or days when I’m just bumming around the office doing admin I’ll often just wear jeans and a shirt, or something else that’s quite gender-neutral because it’s easy and comfortable. The guys in the office (although there aren’t that many of them, interestingly) can essentially do this every day with little variation in how smart they look – I once went to a meeting in Leicester with plimpsoles for the journey and massive heels whipped on only when I was just around the corner.

By: ladylugosi

ladylugosi — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 08:48:09 +0000

At big corporate companies where I’ve worked although there isn’t formally a uniform – in practice there is a very definite uniform – yet it could be covered by the description of suit,shirt,tie for men, skirt and blouse for women – except the higher up the hierarchy the more noticeably expensive the clothes became and the more noticeably better cut and more ‘serious’ in a way – no particularly bright colours or frills, and ostentation for the women was shown more in jewellery rather than clothing.

It all heads back to tribal marking doesn’t it?

I used to enjoy so called ‘dress down friday’ as I took that to mean ‘goth up friday’ and used to enjoy seeing just how far I could push it without taking it too far – pinstripe is a marvellous thing and can be subverted so well :-)