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Monday, July 26, 2010
Geek Dress Code? Really?
Jeri posted a question about Geek Women & Clothing, and my first thought was, “are you kidding me?”
Jeri’s questions were raised by this essay on Clothes & Geek Feminism, which addresses the question in a slightly different manner, but still, it bothers me.
I am who I am. I dress in a manner that makes me comfortable, and I feel makes me look approachable–after all, my job is to help people. I rarely wear make-up, because that’s who I am and it’s the way I’ve always been.
This question puts my hackles up, because I’ve spent a great deal of time getting comfortable with myself in my own skin, and I don’t see why I should have to dress in an manner as dictated by anyone just to properly classify myself as a true geek.
In my opinion, what people see when they look at me is shown as much by my projected attitude as by what I wear. My goal is to look competent, approachable, and helpful, and in my opinion, I show that through my attitude. I do not dress to conform to anyone’s ideas and attitudes of who I am, I dress to be comfortable and to do my job.
For me, the point of being a geek is taking delight in who I am and the things that make me happy. If a geeky t-shirt makes me happy, then that’s great. If a silk suit makes someone else happy, good for them.
If people think I lack “geek cred” because I dress–or fail to dress–in a specific manner, that is their problem, not mine.
July 26th, 2010 at 10:36 am
Michelle, you’ve put your finger on it more accurately than I have – I’ve always thought the geek ‘culture’, if there is one, is all about supporting individuality and nonconformity, being comfortable and being truly myself.
July 26th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
That a certain number of geek types dress similarly at times is more a function of form and function of said comfortable and practical clothing than some unassailable geek dress code. (grin)
Dr. Phil
July 26th, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Now see that, Dr Phil, I get. If something is comfortable or useful or well-made or whatever, people will gravitate to it. That makes sense.
But having the geek equivalent of fashion week–that makes no sense to me at all. I don’t WANT to look like anyone else–I went to Catholic school and had both uniforms and dress codes–I want NOTHING to do with uniforms or mandatory clothing ever again.
July 28th, 2010 at 9:49 am
I think the article was coming at the isue more from the viewpoint of the business world. In that respect, there is a definite division between the “suits” and the worker bees. The more you dress like a “suit” – who have a not undeserved reputation for being technically clueless – the more the geeks want to avoid you. On the other hand, it is a professional environment, so the bottom rungs of the geek fashion ladder evident in an academic setting (t-shirts, jeans, sandals etc.) are not open anymore. So the geeks in industry are squeezed into a much narrower fashion band.
And the clothes you wear do send signals a majority of the time. Someone who comes into a professional setting in jeans, sandals and a ripped t-shirt is most likely to be aying one of 2 things: a) “I don’t give a rodent’s rear end about your company norms” or b)”I’m too clueless to even notice that there are company norms”. In neither case is the geek thinking outside his or her own box – the possibility of customer interaction and the expectations of competence that are set by dress in the wider world (which is why most doctors still wear ties). And in either case, coworkers and managers are going to form an impression that is not very positive right from the get-go. And 90% of the time, they will be correct in their assessment, so even if you’re the special snowflake in the 10% exception, you’re still going to get lumped in with the idiots, and either you realize this and chnage your ways, or you spend your life wondering why you’re always pased over for promotions.
So there is some geek social pressure not to dress down too much and make everyone in the tech lines look like more of a dweeb than they already do. On the other side there is the mistrust of technical people who actually work for a living for the b-school grad who formed their fashion sense in prep-school. One statistician I know told me she had a hard time taking someone seriosuly if they come to work in her department every day in “elf shoes” – and quite frankly, my experience bears her out – women who wear heels to technical jobs are often looking to climb the ladder on the b-side (hence they dress the part even before making the jump), and often people like that (men or women) want to make the jump because they don’t have the geek cred to cut it for long on the technical side. In the lab it’s even more of an issue – you can crunch numbers (uncomfortably) in a suit, but you shouldn’t be working in a fume hood in heels.
The only people I know who have serious geek cred and still dress like a suit are research doctors – and the reason is patient contact.
This is a long-winded way of saying that outside of academia, dress is no longer purely about comfort, and geek culture is no longer about freedom of choice, it’s about identity – once external groups whom you care about (and you definitely care about the suits who cut your paycheck, and if you’re smart you care about the perceptions of your customers) start to partially* define you, you do start to look harder at what your clothes say about you. And there are a limited number of clothing choices that fit the comfortable-but-business-casual bill.
This is a big part of my learning curve for my new job. If I wear a suit in some labs, I look too corporate. On the other hand, if I walk into some places without a suit, I look unprofessional. That last thing I want is for my clothes to get in the way of me being effective at my job, whatever their comfort level for me.
*If you let them fully define you, you’re an idiot.
July 28th, 2010 at 10:17 am
That is all true John, however, dressing to suit the job is very different from dressing to show you are a geek.
It’s one thing to point out to a geek who may have mild Aspergers the social signals they may not be able to pick up on. Learning how to function in society is something everyone needs to be able to job to get and keep a job.
But it’s something else entirely for geek culture to say, “you don’t dress like us, therefore you are not one of us.”
It is the later to which I react so strongly.
My status as a geek should not be based upon my exterior plumage, but instead should be based upon my ability to take joy in the things I like, regardless of whether society at large likes those things.
I had similar feelings in re the punk scene. When a band made it big, suddenly a sub-set of “punks” no longer liked that band, regardless of whether the individuals had–in fact–”sold out” or not.
It is the attitude that something “normal” is by default suspect, or other. And on that I call bullshit. Choosing to exclude someone from a cultural sub-group that has historically been excluded from “popular culture” seems like a case of sour grapes.
Becoming exclusionary only treats others the same way we complained about being treated previously.
In other words, judge not lest ye be judged.
July 28th, 2010 at 11:08 am
“That is all true John, however, dressing to suit the job is very different from dressing to show you are a geek.”
But I think that the former was the point of the original article, or at least the point was how to dress to suit the job while still showing allegiance to the technical workers. getting too far outside a geek norm starts to make people suspect you are aligning yourself with the Wharton grads who think they know your business better than you do because they can run some Monte Carlo simulations on a gigo marketing model. That was what I read into it, anyway, from the mention of “suits”. You can’t extrapolate the author’s intent beyond that to the personal world of what you’d wear to a convention or a con and how people would accept you, which is more of how you seem to be reacting.
I’ve run into the exclusionary stuff once in a while in my work on the “suit” side of things – I generally wear clothes a bit better than what the average geek wears, oftentimes an actual suit. But a Ph.D. in the physical sciences gives one more geek cred than almost anything except a Ph.D. in math or computer science, and I’ve seen people physically react when I reveal my background to them.
That snap judgement is perfectly fine with me – I have some of the very same reservations about “suits” that they do, but I swim in those shark infested waters, so I need to at least have the appearance of a dorsal fin.
I’ve run into that “normal = simple minded” predjudice, too, but not among non-academic geeks so much. If the article had been written by an academic, I think you’d have seen that used as the example, rather than “suit”