[Sigia-l] Dress Code

[Ziya Oz]

Will Parker:

> My personal style is upper-end business casual with clients and/or
> people outside my department, jeans and t-shirt with the usual co-
> workers. 

In matters of dress, you can be sympathetic to your audience, subvert it or
confront it, but you should not ignore it. Kandinsky constructed his vivid
and elaborate abstractions while wearing a tailored three-piece with a watch
chain. His Bauhaus colleague Moholy-Nagy (while working on his life's
project which he called 'the hygiene of the optical') wore a boiler suit to
demonstrate technical credentials. I would dress differently for, say, a
book launch, a date (even with my wife), a student lecture or a formal
meeting where I was hoping to raise £5m from a Swiss bank. And it might not
be exactly as you suspect: the flowered shirt with jeans for the bankers and
the dark blue suit for the students would, I think, make the most
interesting impression.

It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we
are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the
impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the
one we fret about). You could say it would be a lifetime's quest to
reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole. Maybe, but for the
time being I am convinced that, in Kurt Vonnegut's words (there I go,
quoting again): you are what you pretend to be.


The gentle art of selling yourself:
<http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2025919,00.html>

----
Ziya

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted,
they would have asked for a faster horse." -- Henry Ford