Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

PART II

Life Skills 101

7

Clothes and the Man

For the most part, in high school or college no one cared how you dressed. Oh sure, you might have donned certain clothes to fit in with a particular school subculture, but for most of us it was T-shirts and jeans. You were lucky if your school had uniforms, because the fact is, if you went to West Point you’re better prepared for the expectations of the real world than if you went to Slobovian U. The real world expects you to dress like the professional you claim to be.

Dressing for Success (at Goodwill)

A book called Dress for Success was on a bookshelf at almost every friend’s house when I was kid. I didn’t read it then because “dressing for success” at my age wasn’t really up to me. I wore the clothes my parents bought for me. And I didn’t read it later because by the time I landed my first job its ideas were firmly ensconced in the corporate world. The principle message was dress well so that business executives take you seriously.

John T. Malloy first published Dress for Success in 1975 when leisure suits were a thing. Can you imagine wearing a leisure suit unironically? It actually happened. Millennial men might have to deal with meggings and skinny suits, but at least they’ve never been told that it was desirable to look like Cousin Eddie from National Lampoon’s Vacation. The 1970s were the nadir of American fashion. No one was spared the horror, including one little boy with a bowl haircut who was forced to wear plaid overalls with an olive green turtleneck for a cheap Sears studio photograph that would taunt him throughout the rest of his childhood from its position atop the living room mantelpiece. But I digress.

Malloy’s book came out at a culturally appropriate time, and it’s continued to resonate in certain sectors of the corporate world. It’s undeniable, however, that clothing standards overall have become a lot more casual.

When, for example, did wearing pajamas outside become a thing? Back in 2012, a Louisiana lawmaker actually floated the idea of banning the wearing of sleepwear outside the home after seeing one too many pairs of PJs in public. Caddo Parish District Commissioner Michael Williams warned, “Today it’s pajamas. Tomorrow it’s underwear. Where does it stop?”

I feel for the commissioner. I really do. But the forces of the onesies are sneaky. The company Betabrand, for instance, offers “The Suitsy”—a one-piece zip-up set of pajamas that can be worn (theoretically, anyway) as a suit in an office. Actually, the Suitsy isn’t billed as pajamas at all, but that’s what it is. You might be able to get away with charging $380 for a zip-up suit, but there’s no way you can get away with charging that much money for a pair of pajamas.

I get the comfort factor. Pajamas are super comfortable. But it’s also lazy. When you leave the house in pajamas, what you are telling the world is “I’m too lazy to actually put on clothes.” If clothes make the man, then wearing zip-up pajamas with feet makes the ManChild.

Now, having said that, good luck figuring out your corporate dress code. It’s been pretty simple for me, but the rules are changing. For all I know you could be required to wear a Suitsy before long. When I was a reporter, I used to envy the television videographers because they could wear shorts and golf shirts in the Oklahoma summers. Sports reporters could get away with that dress code as well, but news reporters, even those of us who worked in radio and weren’t on camera (unless we accidentally wandered into someone’s live shot), were expected to look “professional.” Twenty years later and I’ve hosted television news shows in a T-shirt and ball cap. Suits are not my thing. I’m much more likely to be found in a sport coat with jeans, and I’m never without my ballcap. But even I have standards: I don’t think I’ll ever host a show in my pajamas. While Jim’s been known to blog in his, I think he’ll probably stick to a real jacket and tie when appearing on cable news, though he might already have ordered his own Suitsy by the time you read this. No matter how casual the dress is in your work environment, you’re never going to impress the people who matter by pattering around the office in your PJs.

One final point about looking professional in an increasingly casual world: not everything in your closet needs to come from a high-end brand or has to be bought at a high-end store. It’s relatively easy to look professional even on a tight budget. In my mid-twenties, I would unashamedly shop for clothes at the local Goodwill. I always found something, whether it was a sport coat, some casual dress shirts, or a pair of serviceable khakis. I was able to wear better quality clothes than I could afford to buy new. And by then I had a wife to make sure I didn’t accidentally buy a Cousin Eddie leisure suit or plaid overalls—one of the innumerable ways a wife can improve your life.

What to Expect When You’re Not Dressing for Success

I’d just like to note that this “Dressing for Success” chapter was Cam’s idea, because I can hear the scoffing about my wardrobe from here.

I walk into my closet a lot of mornings and think, okay, what can I get away with wearing today? What stains are least visible? You see, I have an eating disorder; too much food that I attempt to eat doesn’t end up in my mouth.

It is an unfortunate fact of human physiology that anything that misses your mouth in the process of eating or drinking is destined to land, front and center, upon your shirts or ties—exactly where everyone looks at you. If, by some miracle, it misses the shirt or tie, it’s going to land in your crotch, which is even worse.

My food is the Professor Moriarty to Billy Mays’s and OxiClean’s Sherlock Holmes—a creative, nefarious, relentlessly determined arch-nemesis, constantly driven to outdo past performances. “Oh, you say your detergent can get rid of any stain? Challenge accepted, old bean. The game is afoot.”

You would think my lower lip had an escape hatch. If the falling nacho salsa, soup, coffee, marinara sauce,^* cheese sauce, gravy, or other stain-in-waiting could just somehow adopt a magic-bullet-style trajectory, and curve around the front of me, and land on, say, my shirttail in the back, where it’s obscured by the lower part of the suit jacket, my life would be so much better. Is there any way to get lobster bibs to be acceptable for all meals? Or maybe entire raincoats? I try not to be messy, but somehow I go to a neighborhood barbeque and it looks like I sat in the front row of a Gallagher performance.

I used to have a fancy watch that worked fine for a long time, then started running slow. I found a watch repairman, who opened it up and took a look. He came back and asked, “Do you eat a lot of marinara sauce?”

I have now reached the point where if I’m going to be in front of people and need to look professional, I simply don’t eat once I’m in my suit. Too many variables—the stain, the bit of spinach stuck in the teeth, the irrepressible untimely belch mid-sentence. If it’s a morning meeting, I’ll drink coffee very carefully.

I’m not saying this is a perfect solution; I’ve found my stomach registering its objection to this arrangement mid-interview with Marco Rubio, and desperately hoping the microphone on my lapel didn’t pick up the gurgling in my midsection. Billy Crystal’s old Saturday Night Live character “Fernando” kept telling people, “It is better to look good than to feel good,” reportedly quoting actor Fernando Lamas. This is probably a terrible philosophy for your overall life, but not a bad idea for those big meetings or moments when you absolutely need to look your best.

I work in Washington, D.C., which is allegedly a spectacularly fashion-conservative town. I don’t mind that. It simplifies things. “Fifty Shades of Grey” originally referred to the acceptable palette for suits here. You know how cheesy sci-fi films usually featured a dystopian future where everyone dresses the same? For a lot of people working in the corridors of power in the nation’s capital, that future is now.

Look, after hours, wear whatever the heck you want. But for every job interview, wear a suit. Unless you’ve been specifically directed otherwise, overdress. If you arrive at a work event dressed too formally, it’s easy to adjust—loosen or remove the tie, take off the jacket, etc. It’s almost impossible to overcome dressing too casually.

What’s the worst that could happen, you ask?

Pity poor Lance Futch of Vivint Solar, who was invited to an event at a Utah Air Force base about helping veterans transition to the private sector.^* Futch, dressed in a company polo shirt, arrived and was escorted to a small room, where he learned the event was a small, intimate meeting and that the guests included Senator Orrin Hatch and President Obama, all covered by cameras of the national press corps. But give Futch credit: his company polo shirt was stain-free!

Geoff Earle, “Guy in Polo Shirt Stunned When ‘Official’ at Meeting Is Obama,” New York Post, April 8, 2015, http://nypost.com/2015/04/08/manstunned-when-meeting-with-federal-official-turns-out-to-be-obama/.

Sure, there are workplaces where dressing formally is frowned upon. Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel says that when PayPal was starting up, they automatically dismissed anyone who arrived for a job interview in a suit, and said that he and his investors “never invest in a CEO that wears a suit.” You can love this philosophy or hate it, but Thiel is enforcing Silicon Valley’s own dress code: “I’m too much of a genius technology guru, contemplating the next world-changing innovation, to fuss with neckties.”

Fairly or not, appearances matter. Yes, it would be a better world if everyone would assess you on your mind, your talents, your ideas, and everything that can’t come across in a first visual impression. But they don’t, and you can react to this hard fact in two ways. You can whine about it and make an ultimately pointless gesture of defiance by not looking your best, or you can cinch up a tie, give it your best shot, and see if it helps.

I’m on television pretty regularly, and here’s a little secret: everybody focuses on the waist up. We’re behind a news desk. One of cable news’ biggest hosts, whose name I won’t mention—okay, his name rhymes with Schmawn Schmannity—does the show in jeans and sneakers, as well as a suit and tie on top. He can pull it off; it’s his show. But I wouldn’t dare. Because you know that would be the night where the desk suddenly collapsed and they needed us to appear standing up. Or Schmawn Schmannity might tell me to get up from behind the desk and run a post pattern on that football he throws around as he’s heading to commercial.

I have since been advised by my friend Mickey White, who worked in television a long while, that white shirts are a no-no on television; apparently they’re too reflective. Blue is a nice, soft color. Patterns can be dangerous; the wrong kind of parallel lines can create a distortion effect on the broadcast.

You may say, “Eh, this doesn’t matter, I don’t work on television.” But you work in a world where just about everyone has a video camera in their phone. Yes, not only do appearances matter, but on any given day, you can end up in some recording that could end up being seriously consequential.

What Would Ward Cleaver Do?

It’s easy to imagine Ward mowing the lawn while wearing a collared shirt, maybe even a tie. He saves his gym clothes for the gym, his pajamas for bed, and while he might dress differently at home than he does at work, he doesn’t dress less well. Dressing well is dressing courteously.