Recession and Fashion

I remember reading somewhere some fifteen or twenty years ago that IBM had this culture of ‘White Shirts’. Anyone found deviating a wee bit from ‘the colour white’ had to face the consequences of raised eyebrows. People at IBM would virtually look down on this poor fellow as if he had dressed up for a picnic.

Those were the days.


During the years, a conspicuous change happened in men’s dress style. With boom time, the dress sense changed. It became shabby. Workers thrived in wrinkles, T Shirts and Jeans. The guy with the shirt and an occasional tie was seen as a person attending someone’s wedding. We were encouraged to be ‘cool’. Even the billionaires looked like hobos.

The concept behind this ‘coolness’ of being shabbily dressed was to give the general notion that one really did not care what others thought. One oneself was the cutting edge, the idol demolisher, the slayer of conventions, a person who does not give a damn about what society thinks or how society judges. One’s value was one’s very own person, the fact of one’s existence on this planet. During the boom time the message of fashion was – Hey! It’s all about me guys!

Today all that has now come into question. How much value did this jean clad guys really add? How much of their coolness has evaporated? How much was illusion all along? Maybe all this hype about intellectual capital is nonsense.

Now with the downturn of economy, the sense of better fashion if one wants to survive, has once again come into being.
The free-fall economy means a boon for better fashion for men who intend to survive the onslaught.

"A suit has become something you wear when you're asking for money, monkey."
One’s clothes now need to generate a different message. Resources are few and hard to spare. Everyone wants to conserve. So the goal of one’s life too becomes different. One now is no longer permitted to pretend that one’s existence is a blessing to the world. Now one must add more value than one can take from it. The new motto now should be:
“I can add more value to the Organization than I can take from it”


In other words, “I am a willing sucker”

These days this is what every employer is seeking. It’s a dog eat dog world. A dog now has to stand out. The dog now must find ways to exhibit that it is not nonessential or dispensable and that tossing it out would do more harm to the company than good. The dog must now illustrate that the company would lose more revenue by kicking it out than by keeping it.



Employers think that clothing reflects one’s seriousness. Today dogs are under pressure to perform, to show that they are valuable, to demonstrate on sight that they are desirable commodities as workers.