Comfort is the New Black

I have a love/hate relationship with dress codes. I've typically always followed them without question, seeing them as an element of civilized society. With every new job I've always asked what the code is. I think dining in a fancy restaurant warrants wearing a fancy dress. I would rather be overdressed than underdressed in practically any situation.

But as I've gotten older, I've grown to see some of the long-enduring rules of appropriate dress as both antiquated and unnecessary.

As a college senior in the mid-1990s I was required to attend a mock job interview at my school's career center. This included dressing *professionally* as one would for a real interview. As luck would have it, a snowstorm hit the night before my interview. Awaking to find my car utterly snowed in, I put on several layers of clothing and laced up my snow boots for the half-mile hike to campus.

Despite my intelligent answers and professional demeanor, the interviewer at the career center marked points off my evaluation for my "inappropriate attire." I suppose I should have trudged through the snow in pumps. A woman is only as good as her appearance, right?  

I later found out that a classmate who had an interviewed the same day was deducted points because the heels on her shoes were deemed "too fat and trendy." I'm so glad to know that our tuition money was well spent on footwear advice.

Ellen Warren is a syndicated writer with the Chicago Tribune, currently producing a weekly shopping advice column. Back in March she focused on new college grads who would soon be facing the job world. Among her Dos and Don'ts was "hosiery is a must." Are we back to this debate again? Have we not come to the conclusion that lower extremity sausage casing does not in any way indicate a woman's qualifications to be an accountant/engineer/doctor?

At a recent job interview, my interviewer walked into the board room wearing jeans and a hipster V-neck t-shirt. "Egads!", the Boomer would think. "Young man, you march back to your room and put on a necktie until you look respectable!" Oh, wait, this man had "director" in his title, and the company is a corporation with annual sales in the tens of millions. Somehow, despite the obvious lack of silken nooses, it was still a professional environment.

The Nylon Hurtin'

In the movie Steel Magnolias, Dolly Parton's character, Truvy, claims she hasn't left the house without pantyhose on since she was 14 years old. To this her friend Clairee confirms, "You were raised right!"

Does this make you cringe, or raise your white-gloved fist in prim solidarity?

Generation X women came of age on the cusp of the change in dress code attitudes, balancing on the cotton crotch of the Great Pantyhose Divide. We grew up when hose were still the norm, but we entered the professional world realizing we weren't so keen on spending our paychecks on clothing that had a life span of about 2 wearings. When casual Fridays became popular the first thing we tossed were the pantyhose. And yet, I still struggle with "appropriate" times to wear them, much as I struggle just to put on the blessed things.

On Friday I had a job interview, and while dressing I once again pondered my bare legs with apprehension. My stylish-yet-conservative dress fell just above the knee--the norm for me at just shy of 6 feet tall. I worried it was too informal this way. Surely the second skin of some L'eggs would solve this problem and make my ensemble more...respectable.

This is where it gets weird.

Why do pantyhose equal "respectable"?

Why did I think that going bare-legged would somehow negate the validity of my master's degree and corporate experience? Why did I place so much weight on the power of an ounce of woven nylon? Years and years of condemnation from older generations, that's why. Gen X girls were taught that to be perceived as mature, professional, and/or proper we must wear pantyhose. Without question.

I worked my way through college in about 20 different retail jobs. Most of them required me to wear pantyhose. At least one even prohibited us girls from wearing pants. That was 1992.

But we have a powerful woman on OUR side now. Our own First Lady, Michelle Obama (by broadest definition a member of Generation X herself), has been quite vocal in her disdain for pantyhose. As a guest on The View she said, "I stopped wearing pantyhose a long time ago. They're painful...it's inconvenient."

She garnered some vitriolic backlash from this comment, being called everything from "unfeminine" to "vulgar" because of it. Crazy, isn't it?

So I'm taking a stand, a bare-legged stand. Those pantyhose I wore to my interview, the ones that caused my shoes to fit too loosely and hence fly off my left foot in the lobby of said interview, they are history! Those fancy silk-like pantyhose that cost $8.95 a pair and still rip when I barely bump them with a hangnail...history! I'm done with you, you antiquated casings of synthetic torture. I refuse to allow my character to be judged (real or imagined) by the presence or absence of some Underalls. The debate continues, but I'm standing with the First Lady on this one.