Pandemic may put a wrinkle in our officewear
The pandemic will change the way we live, we are told. We will all dress as badly as that Zuckerberg creature. Our way of life post-COVID-19 will be cleaner, less hidebound, more leisurely. Our bedrooms will be offices. Cities will be redesigned, transit will improve, the great unfairnesses of life have been noticed and will be repaired, and so on.
I disagree, believing the pandemic might freshen the wallpaper here and there but truly revolutionary change will only come agonizingly as the planet heats. But I will hear your arguments for the pandemic as reinvention of the human.
It is alleged that the hidden underpaid labour that makes our Canadian lives so very comfortable will be brought to light and paid so much more. I am skeptical. Canadians would be unwilling or unable to buy strawberries at, say, $20 a punnet, which is what it might cost to pay and house summer seasonal fruit-pickers safely and fairly.
If we did pay it, other economic trade-offs would be made. We might have to earn more to be able to buy those berries, and how is that to be done? Or all rooftops would become chaste, artisanal strawberry fields. Whither cherry trees?
Large-scale economic change is slow and difficult, like an elephant trying to remove its winter hide and change into a fresher summer outfit while sitting in an old office cubicle. It can be done but it will be messy. Either the cubicle (and the floor it’s on) or the elephant survives; it can’t be both.
I base this on what Americans said after 9/11, that “this changes everything.” It didn’t. Time passed. Three thousand people died on that day, 160,000 fewer than have died in the American pandemic, but it goes unmentioned in favour of the Vietnam War death toll.
Perhaps we should lower our sights. What changes might the pandemic bring, realistically and reasonably quickly?
Open windows, for one thing. I read with fascination a Bloomberg report on the history of the radiator. “The Spanish Influenza … changed heating once and for all,” writes Patrick Sisson. Health officials knew that fresh air fended off viral infection even in winter, and only steam heat could keep a room warm even as healthful fresh air rushed in through open windows.
What luck. Roughly 80 per cent of New York City residences are apparently still heated by radiators. It’s people in modern sealed-off office buildings and condo towers without openable windows who are in trouble now. We don’t know how best to ventilate an office building while filtering out the coronavirus.
Another aspect of work and home life pops up: officewear. The claim is that from now on, all office workers will be in “comfortwear,” presuming they ever return to the office. It began with Casual Fridays, then tieless Office Casual, followed by Office Hoodie, and with the pandemic slithered quickly to Work-From-Home Sloppy.
What are work clothes now? There has always been an “association between competence and traditional dress,” Amanda Mull writes in the Atlantic. Dress for the job you want, dress codes impose internal discipline, etc.
Several years ago, there was a tide of anger at environmentally unfriendly, sweatshop-assembled “fast fashion.” I deplored it. It was a coded way of blaming working women for their frothy, silly ways, buying and discarding great wads of clothing simply to be fashionable. But men’s suits are just another way of signalling power in the workplace and no one complained about male fast fashion.
Historically, cheap massproduced clothing was a huge factor in raising the wages of the poor. It made them look less poor, therefore more plausible in a white-collar job, and it was a ticket to ride for tens of millions. Plentiful, inexpensive clothing is camouflage, armour for the cruelties of a competitive workplace.
The pandemic may initially allow everyone to dress androgynously — sweatpants and T-shirt — but it will revert, mainly because clothes send a message and that message, aside from “I put on whatever I found on the bedroom floor this morning,” is the equally unattractive “I am one of the crowd. I am indistinguishable. I am central heating.”
Post-pandemic, work clothes will need to say, “I am competent. I can move nimbly from place to place, absorbing new information and acting on it.” Basically the message is “I am the steam heat.”
Even before COVID-19, the Toronto Star newsroom was difficult for me. The carpettiled newsroom covered up large electrical connection holes in the floor without sealing them. My heels would catch and I would trip. It was literally an unsafe space.
The newsroom floor was intended for men, always had been, and only their big flat leather shoes could walk on it safely. I was told to dress down and I did. I wonder if postpandemic, men will dress as they wish and, as always, women will have to copy them.
Huge events are always shakeouts. As the coronavirus waves draw back, what changes will be left on the sand for women and men to live with?
Post-pandemic, work clothes will need to say, “I am competent. I can move nimbly from place to place, absorbing new information and acting on it”