As mentioned before, some folks have queried some of the Rules from time to time.
It doesn't surprise me that there have been some queries on dress code, it's one the most contentious and thought about issues in agency land.
So I got this question:
"I've just started work at one of the most sought after agencies in town as a junior planner. As you can imagine, as a junior planner, I'm not paid a lot, but it seems the dress code for the agency is way out of my league. Not only do I not have a clue what is cool to wear (and I don't want to be seen to be copying everyone else), I just can't afford the stuff. You mention ditching the suits, I reckon a tailor made three piece from Saville Row would be cheaper!! What do I do"
To respond to this question, I'll take you back September 1990, the year I left from secondary school and returned a 'sixth former'. Sixth formers choose to stay and do their 'A Levels' the entry qualifications required for university. As school wasn't compulsory, neither was school uniform.
Naturally, we were all excited to liberated from the tyranny of itchy grey trousers, the school tie and light blue shirts designed with the sole purpose of making you sweat bullets, even in winter when they had the added power of making you simultaneously cold.
All this at the age when young men naturally sweat if an attractive girl moved within 10 metres of them.
So we were all gung ho to express ourselves, joyously wearing what the hell we liked. Only to find freedom was a living hell.
Suddenly, every morning, you had to decide what to wear. The fine balance between looking like an individual and fitting in.
Having to know what was fashionable, avoiding the crushing shame of turning up wearing the same as someone else. The horror of being caught out for wearing the same thing twice in a week.
So much pressure and thought, many of use quickly pined for the bygone days of the school uniform. Sweating through the polyester of your uniform shirt if Gabriella Bentley even threatened to looked at you seemed like nirvana.
I often feel this way about the bygone days of suits in ad agencies (the simplicity, not the sexual tension).
I remember going to an APG training thing in London, when the venerable planning director running the session, (expensively dressed like a poverty stricken skater) commented, "The thing I always notice about the North is that they're still wearing suits". This was 2002 and he was right, the suits still wore suits while the planning types tended to opt for smart jeans or chinos and some sort of suit jacket, with polo shirt usually.
It was blessedly simple.
Then everyone started to wear what the hell they wanted and a Pandora's Box of pain and suffering opened up on us.
Media agencies lasted a few years longer. Even now, you can get away with jeans, brogues the size of ships and a designer suits jacket, if you are 45 or over.
For the rest of us, it's the deliberations over how smart do you go when you see the client, are flip flops acceptable, shorts in high summer and what sort of image you want to put across. And, of course, spending loads of money on garb only agency folk will appreciate, while to everyone else, you look like you dressed in the dark.
In other words, a world without uniforms still forces you to conform, but without the comfort of easy to follow guidelines.
I used to work with Mother and loved the way the creatives all managed to look the same.
Three years ago, walk around Clerkenwell, all you could see was agency people with selvedge jeans turned up so far they were nearly shorts.
So, back to the question of what to do about it if you're in an extreme case, like the author of my question.
This brings us to the Devil Wears Prada (the film never read the book). It's not a classic, apart from the performance from Meryl Streep and the fact the hitherto unknown Emily Blunt stole the film.
Our hero, Andi, joins Runway magazine (Vogue basically) to find she will never fit in unless she loses weight (from thin to emaciated) and starts to wear the gear in the magazines with suitable panache.
By the way, this scene reminds me a many a discussion over two words in a 100 slide powerpoint presentation at work.
Oh, and I've worked for Meryl Streep's character twice. They know who they are.
Anyway.
After fighting the inevitable for a bit, like a racing cyclist in the 1990's trying to win without EPO, she gives in, loses a few pounds ad starts to rock the latest styles....and of course sees her star ride within the office.
If this doesn't look like the drip of folks walking into Mother then I don't know what does.
Of course, our hero eventually realises she has lost her identity and what she really cares about, ditches the wardrobe and leaves for a very different kind of publisher - always knowing she came so close to being seduced forever by the dark side.
My correspondent faces a similar dilemma. Clothes send out social signals, they always do. Not just on a personal level, they say something about the organisation. What you wear represents you and your employer, it's a fact, get used to it.
If you work at a place where you're under pressure to look amazing, or achingly obscurely cool, you know it will have a certain kind of culture. Probably, it will have a certain kind of work - usually, sometimes great, more often than not, up it's own arse. But always, always, a place people will die to work for.
That's for some, not for all.
Others will have some sort of uniform, sometimes more relaxed, sometimes it really is 'be yourself' we don't care. These places do great work, have a deeper relationship with the client because they care more about the actual relationship, rather than intimidating clients into buying what they're told.
This is for some, not all.
So, clothes, totally tangled up in identity on a personal and corporate level really matter. If you can find an overlap between your attitude to clothes and your employer's, you'll most likely find a cultural fit too. If they don't blend, get the hell out before it's too late.
Or at last until you've done enough time and got some 'cool work' on your CV - just don't stay too long to forget you're only pretending.
Back to the cycling metaphor, Lance Armstrong only started taking drugs when he realised everyone else was, we all know what happened next.
One more thought - the more you try to look different, the more you usually ending up looking like everyone else .
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