The Tragic Decline of Business Casual, from Business Week

From: http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_42/b4199094714620.htm

The Tragic Decline of Business Casual

Liberal dress policies in the office have led to terrible outfits and terrible looks. Now employers are fighting back

October 7, 2010, 5:00PM EST

Remember the late 1990s and early 2000s, when "casual Friday" was a naughty thrill? How innocent we were. In the past decade those seemingly harmless polo shirts and khakis have spawned a five-day sartorial office free-for-all that's led to low-cut jeans and "tramp stamp" tatoos. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, the most recent data available, 43 percent of workers said they regularly wore casual business attire at the office, up from 32 percent in 2002. Even scarier, the lax precedent has allowed them to make their own decisions about what's acceptable or, worse, cool.

The C-suite is striking back. A survey released in June by the Society for Human Resource Management found that only 34 percent of bosses officially permitted casual dress among employees every day—a dramatic drop from 53 percent in 2002. Some executives are hiring image consultants and fashion experts to crack down on everything from muumuus to Little House On the Prairie-style pioneer dresses. "American society has become so ridiculously casual," says Clinton Kelly, co-host of the Learning Channel's What Not to Wear. The problem, he suggests, may be the lack of office fashion role models. "Outrageous people are getting the most attention now," he says. "Kids coming out of college are watching Lady Gaga on YouTube (GOOG). They don't understand that Lady Gaga is selling albums, and they're in accounting. A meat dress just doesn't fly at the office."

Popularized in Silicon Valley, the casual office look has always had noble intentions. "At Google (GOOG) we know that being successful has little to do with what an employee is wearing," says Jordan Newman, a spokesman for the company. "We believe one can be serious and productive without a suit." That may be the case for engineers dealing with complicated algorithms. However, professional image coach Lizandra Vega remembers meeting a male worker at the New York staffing firm where she's a managing partner. He arrived for a meeting in thin white cotton slacks—and no underwear. "He was," she recalls, "hanging loose."

Even upper management isn't immune to terrible dress habits. Diane Gottsman, owner of the Protocol School of Texas, recalls teaching a business fashion workshop in Houston last year during which she met an executive "wearing a straw paperboy hat pulled sideways," she says. "He had on suspenders and black-and-white spectator shoes. He asked, 'What do you think of my look?' " Gottsman tried to be diplomatic, suggesting he take off his hat indoors. "He couldn't do that," she says. "The hat helped him with his 'swagga.'"

Workers may not like rules, but some need them. A 2002 survey by the recently shuttered department-store chain Mervyns revealed that 90 percent of office workers didn't know the difference between formal business attire, business casual, and just plain casual. However, companies such as General Electric (GE) force them to make these distinctions every day by asking that they "use good, professional judgment," as GE puts it. Ginger Burr, president of Total Image Consultants in Lynn, Mass., recalls a fashion workshop she conducted with a national bank. "We were talking about sandals," she remembers. "There seemed to be a consensus that sandals shouldn't be worn. Then this beautifully dressed female executive walked in wearing sandals, and said, 'We should be able to wear nice sandals.' When you get into personal taste, that's where it becomes tricky."

Sandy Dumont, an image consultant from Norfolk, Va., believes the biggest challenge in overhauling an office worker's wardrobe is avoiding hurt feelings. Her suggestion: Hire a professional image consultant. She was brought in to help a female employee at Rolex who was offending an executive with her "klutzy" footwear—which turned out to be orthopedic shoes. ("She had a slightly deformed foot," says Dumont.) Fearing that a confrontation would offend the woman, Dumont led her on a guided shoe-shopping spree on the company's dime.

Those accustomed to personalized business style aren't taking these changes lightly. "The uniformity of dress serves the current American business model by pressing individuals into the service of the corporate person," says Jack Tuckner, a New York employment attorney who briefly represented Debrahlee Lorenzana, a Citibank (C) employee fired earlier this year for wearing provocative clothing. "It's a largely paramilitary model that eschews independent thinkers," he says. In 2008, Tuckner was sued by a former colleague for allegedly wearing a "bondage collar" at the office. Tuckner denies the allegations. "As a fastidious dresser myself," he says, "I'd be excessively worried about unsightly neckline bulges caused by the lock."

In Britain the concept of business casual is being taken to extremes. The Naked Office, a reality TV series that made its debut in May, asked employees at several businesses to show up for work naked, ostensibly in an attempt to "explore whether flashing the flesh is the ultimate office equalizer"—and boost ratings. Seven Suphi, a behavioral change specialist and author of More Than Men and Make-Up, took part as an expert presenter on the show and says the experiment "had spectacular business results. One business secured their largest deal to date. Another is doing in a month what they previously did in a year." Let us ponder why.

In America, such a radical redefinition of office norms seems unlikely. Carolyn Hawkins, spokeswoman for the American Association of Nude Recreation in Kissimmee, Fla., says even her staff rarely comes to work in the buff. "The AANR's association headquarters is located in a downtown strip mall—no pun intended—with a storefront window," she says. "As practicality and sensitivity to our neighbors dictate, we dress for the workplace. When we return home in the evening we remove the stresses of the workday world by removing our clothes." For the moment, business casual appears to be in no danger of becoming no-pants-casual—but it's still enough to make you pine for the days of khakis and polos.

The Last Institution from July 1997 issue of Crisis Magazine.

From: http://www.insidecatholic.com/feature/the-last-institution.html

The Last Institution

Deal W. Hudson

Some clichés, like some books, seem wise when we are young. Most of the D. H. Lawrence I admired when I was twenty sounds pretty silly to me now.

I remember embracing the cliché about the inferiority of institutional religion as opposed to personal "religiousness." In those days, I bought the assumption that institutions necessarily corrupted the vision they originally served. Institutions, I thought, represented a dry husk needing to be separated from the living kernel.

I was encouraged in this deception by existentialist theologians like Paul Tillich. Tillich's famous notion of the Protestant Principle employed St. Paul's distinction between the letter and the spirit to interpret the history of the Church. In his view, the institutional Church inevitably kills the spirit of the Gospel with the letter of ecclesial regulation and clerical bureaucracy.

Hardly anyone reads Tillich anymore, but his arguments are always close at hand. A. N. Wilson, an English novelist who occasionally dabbles in religious commentary, produced a book that accuses St. Paul of corrupting the pure message of Jesus and replacing it with the institutional Church. It's ironic that a Pauline passage ultimately finds its way around to maligning the author. St. Paul, however, was too inspired to simple-mindedly champion the myth of corrupt institutions.

It's ironic, also, that amateur theologians like Wilson can reproduce bad arguments from thirty, even a hundred years ago and create a bestseller. I wouldn't be surprised if someone starts hawking a book about "demythologizing" the Scriptures, as if Rudolf Bultmann had never lived!

Tillich's complaint, like those who echo him, is really against the temporal nature of human existence. It suggests an impatience and ingratitude often mistaken for spiritual wisdom. The so-called words of wisdom go something like this: A vision suddenly discloses itself in time and necessarily fades into a corrupted shadow of itself. Therefore, time is too fluid to contain the certainty of truth -- time and eternity are like oil and water; they cannot be mixed.

Dangerous nonsense! It's like saying the family should not be an institution, that a parent's task of child-rearing should be over at birth. Or like arguing the long and tedious task of raising a child will inevitably do downhill after the joy of birth. Beyond that, it's like saying there can be no Incarnation, no Body of Christ, no Church.

The Church is the institution par excellence. The Church is the historical repository of the truth about God and man, the place where God and man share a real communion through the administration of the sacraments. The Church has been such an institution for nearly twenty centuries. Its ongoing vitalityy bears witness to the presence of the Spirit.

The Church as institution undergirds and informs all other institutions by providing the fundamental rationale for the necessity of institutions in the salvation of man.

Sadly and tragically, these days, the institutional quality of the Church stands out in sharp relief. The Church once enjoyed other institutional allies -- other religions and Christian denominations, colleges and universities, the professions of law and medicine, and various international organizations. Now the Church stands alone for life, the primacy of the family, the objectivity of truth, the natural law, and God's final sovereignty over man. In this sense, the Church has become the last institution on earth.

Some will say that I am overlooking the emerging coalition of Catholics and Christian evangelicals. I am not.

Evangelicals, however, even though they have allied together within powerful organizations (like Focus on the Family), are congenitally wary of religious institutions. For example, Southern Baptists, the world's second largest Christian denomination, insist upon the autonomy of local congregations and reject the observance of a common creed.

The institutional character of our Church is grounded in the universal celebration of the Eucharist. Nothing could give clearer voice to a Catholic's confidence in the fact of the Incarnation and the power of God to enter and to remain present in human history through his Church.

The Church does not need to be shorn from the kernel of the Gospel; St. Paul does not have to be cast aside in order to embrace Jesus.

The Church is the last institution because it continues to bear witness to the truth about human life.

Our creed and the teaching of the Magisterium have provided successive generations with a window on reality. Our witness can be loud and clear because through faith we are no longer prisoners of the dark recesses of our turbulent subjectivity.  No longer prisoners, but bearers of the Gospel light.

This column originally appeared in the July 1997 issue of Crisis Magazine.

The Bollman Hat Co.

https://www.bollman140.com/1860/hat.cfm#story.cfm

In 2008, the Bollman Hat Company is celebrating our 140th year as a leading designer, manufacturer and distributor of men's, women's, and children's headwear and accessories. Today Bollman has over 500 employees located on four continents and distributes products in 57 countries. This long and proud heritage carries on today as a testimony to the vision, perseverance, and hard work of generations who dedicated themselves to our organization The Bollman Group provides the world with the headwear industry's top brands that include Bailey®, Betmar®, Country Gentleman®, Eddy Bros.®, Helen Kaminski®, Ignite®, KANGOL®, PANTROPIC®, Plaza Suite® and Timberland® headwear. We also provide private label products to leading retailers and apparel brands globally. Our employee/owners manufacture wool felt, fur felt, and straw hats and caps in our plant located in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, USA. With world headquarters also in Adamstown, Bollman today maintains sales and design offices and showrooms in: New York City; Fort Worth, Texas; London, England; and Redfern, Australia. In San Angelo, Texas, we scour wool for the world's finest woolen mills. Bollman products can be found worldwide in specialty stores, department stores, major and regional chain stores, and prominent catalog and e-commerce retailers. In addition, we are a primary supplier of headwear to the outdoor apparel, uniform, costume, formal wear, and golf markets. We have proudly provided headwear to the United States Olympic Committee for 6 Olympic games. Bollman has produced wool berets for the British military. We also produce headwear for prestigious brands such as Orvis®, Cabela's®, Bass Pro Shops®, Urban Outfitters®, Triple 5 Soul® and Pendleton®. Our hats have covered many Hollywood actors from Humphrey Bogart to Fred Astaire and from Brad Pitt to Samuel L Jackson; musicians from Run DMC to Ludacris and from Carlos Santana to The Blues Brothers; athletes from Michael Jordan to Donovan McNabb and from Chi Chi Rodriguez to Christina Kim. The history of Bollman Hat Company is long and distinguished. Our people are proud to cover the world with unparalleled products that provide protection, comfort and style to millions throughout the world. We continue to support many fine local and international causes including education, youth programs, world hunger and skin cancer prevention. We look to the future purposefully and enthusiastically.  Bollman Hat Co. Employees, c. 1932

©2008 Bollman Hat Company    All rights reserved.

The Wreckers - Tennessee - Studio

The Wreckers - Tennessee

Where were you on December 8, 1980?

Where were you? I was probably watching The Flintstones on TV, until the news came on. I remember watching Nightline in our living room. I don't think I knew who John Lennon was.

December 8, 1980 | Where were you?

http://rememberingjohnlennon.com/

Thanks for taking interest in December 8, 1980: The Day John Lennon Died. In the course of researching this book, I came across so many interesting stories about that tragic day. And I wanted to hear more. So I'm looking forward to checking in and reading your individual experiences.

The Age of Adolescense -- Never-never Land by Victor Davis Hanson Dec. 3, 2010

From: http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson120310PF.html

December 3, 2010
The Age of Adolescence
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

Never-never Land

One of the great themes of the 1960s was to "do your own thing." But usually "liberation" distilled down to creating your own rules and norms to justify allowing the appetites and passions to run free, while offering some sort of exalted cover for being either gross or mediocre — or both.

The hip generation that came of age talked about a new, perpetually youthful world that would supplant the values and aspirations of a fading bankrupt establishment (e.g., cf. Bob Dylan's "the order is rapidly fading"). And in time the promise of the sixties, in fact, did permeate the last half-century, creating a contemporary culture of perpetual adolescence, of defying norms and protocols without offering anything much in their place.

From Lady Gaga to Iranian Nukes

Witness current events. A 22-year-old PFC Bradley Manning, without much experience, knowledge, or maturity, somehow becomes a "military analyst." (I thought those were 2-star generals, RAND Ph.Ds, decorated colonels, or old Kissingerian National Security Council pros.)

And in our culture without hierarchy and requisites that title apparently allows him — in between downloading Lady Gaga music while in a combat zone in Iraq — to tap into the secret cables of the US State Department, and destroy two decades worth of diplomatic contacts, trust, and friendships.

No matter — you see poor Bradley was also upset, depressed, and he felt underappreciated. In part, that was because his drag-queen boyfriend had recently dumped him. He was, in his own words, "regularly ignored except when I had something essential then it was back to 'bring me coffee, then sweep the floor.' … [I] felt like I was an abused work horse."

Iranian nukes? North Korean missiles? Again, no problem. Bradley, you see, was depressed and in response had the desire and the power to change the global order. (Or in 60s parlance, "who is to say that Bradley doesn't have the right to shut down the diplomatic world?") Even Bob Dylan would be impressed with how "the times they are a-changin'."

Wikicoward

Next, enter one Julian Assange — himself on the lam, avoiding a little sexy horseplay that the uptight Swedish authorities for some reason deemed thus far sexual battery and molestation. Jason is also angry at "them," the Western world that does horrific things like guarantees enough affluence and security for those like Julian to jet about at will without any visible means of support. In the tradition of sixties nihilism, Julian, of course, tries to gussy up his destructive egotistical angst into some sort of cosmic humane call for more transparency and nice behavior on the part of the US State Department and military.

In more earthly terms that means he is supposed to be something more than a two-bit computer punk that he is, one who would be terrified to extend his online liberationist creed to Iranian mullahs, Chinese communists, Hezbollah terrorists, or Russian gang lords. The latter do far more to trample the human spirit than does any Western nation, but they also at times tend to decapitate, blow up, or jail permanently any would-be Julian who dares to cross them.

Anti-Christ

While this is all going on, we have the spectacle of brave curators at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery offering us for Christmas season a new exhibit [1], emblematic of this current post-"piss-Christ"/Andres Serrano age of art.

Its title is coyly encrypted in postmodern bipolarity: "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." And the exhibition apparently is full of Mapplethorpe-inspired gay-related imagery and offers us an image of Jesus being swarmed over by ants. Clever, brave, bold, shocking. Or in the words of the overseers of the federally-subsidized National Portrait Gallery, such artistic courage proves how the gallery is now "committed to showing how a major theme in American history has been the struggle for justice so that people and groups can claim their full inheritance in America's promise of equality, inclusion, and social dignity."

But once more all that verbiage turns out to be just sixties-ish lingo for about the same old, same old:

1. Abject cowardice — since if a theme were really religious intolerance, why not portray Mohammed in lieu of Christ, inasmuch as contemporary Islam is far more intolerant of gays and liberated women than the so-called Christian West. Such a video might better exhibit just how "committed" these federal artistic bureaucrats were to "equality, inclusion, and social justice."
2. Mediocrity — dressing up talentless soft-core pornographic expression with federal catch-phrases and subsidies ensures a venue for junk art that most otherwise would neither pay to see nor ever exhibit.
3. Politics — all this is supposedly sort of revolutionary, full of neat phrases like "committed," "struggle for justice," "full inheritance," "equality," "inclusion," and "social dignity," and all the empty vocabulary that mostly upscale white nerds like a Bill Ayers employ when they want to tweak and embarrass the gullible liberals who support and pay for their nonsense.

EU Too

On a more global front, we are seeing the children of the sixties deal with debt, as in adolescents buying things even when their parents say they cannot afford them. Sometimes we euphemistically call the binge spending "Keynesian," sometimes "stimulus," sometimes "borrowing." Then when we cannot do it anymore, we look for a "bailout." That means if you are California, a parent like the federal government should print some money; if Greece or Portugal, parents intervene like those automaton Germanic tribes up north who cluelessly love to work rather than enjoy cappuccino from 1-3 each afternoon.

The EU, after all, was a utopian sixties-style project to the core — multicultural (we can by fiat make all cultures equal); nonjudgmental (lifestyles in Greece are just "different" not more laid back or, I dare say lazier, than in northern Europe); dishonest (why be tied down by "their" archaic notions of percentages of GDP, when creative bookkeeping is a revolutionary tool to help the helpless?) — and thus bound to fail. What kept such an anti-democratic, anti-free market, anti-sovereign ruling elite so powerful for so long?

A number of things: free, US-subsidized defense that gave them 2-3% of GDP for social spending right off the top; German industry and greed that, in a two-decade shell game, kept making the money to export luxury goods and machine tools to those who bought on credit at cheap interest with no ability to pay anyone back; shared cheap anti-American rhetoric that replaced former unifying commonalities like Christendom and Western civilization; the work of prior generations who rebuilt Europe through thrift and sacrifice after the war and passed on a workable economy and new infrastructure.

Parents, Please?

Unfortunately, our parents are dead. So who cleans up the messes?

Former Yale Law Dean Harold Koh (author of Can the President Be Torturer in Chief?) now works for Obama and is no longer suing to close Guantanamo, but writing briefs to protect ongoing Predator drone attacks, and shaking a finger at Julian Assange to stop it. Hillary Clinton ("suspension of disbelief") is angry that Bradley Manning leaked information that her subordinates were told to spy on the UN (My God, the UN, no less!).

"not pleased" either.

©2010 Victor Davis Hanson