Apparently the American News has run my latest, but it isn't online. I'll reprint it here:
During our recent presidential search at NSU, all applicants came prepared for the on-campus interviews, including dressing in a professional manner. They all wore suits and ties along with their dress shoes and socks.
What would we think of an applicant who showed up in sweat pants, a t-shirt and sneakers? Most of us would be insulted by such lax dress and this would represent the end of that applicant’s contention for the job.
Why? Professional dress represents a seriousness and care that shows that the job applicant went through the effort to give us his best. To dress formally is to recognize that certain occasions require a certain “form” of acting and dressing. To formalize an occasion is to set it off as important, necessitating its own kind of dress.
Dressing well is one way in which adults set themselves apart from children. Look at old pictures of people at baseball games. The men wore shirts and ties, the women dresses. For baseball! The message was clear: no man is too poor to be a gentleman, no woman too lowly to be a lady.
Take the old notion of wearing one’s “Sunday best” to church. The reason to wear your best clothes to church is to show that we know what happens there is important, indeed the most important thing that we do all week. If one shows up to church dressed no differently than how one dresses while mowing the lawn, that is one way of saying that what happens in church isn’t important. Church is not set aside as something different, something important requiring its own dress.
Surely, it can be asserted, God doesn’t care how we dress. True enough. But it isn’t about God’s attitude toward us, but our attitude toward God. Casual dress runs the risk of breeding a casual attitude about the most serious thing. There is a reason why Medieval Christians built such beautiful churches and made them the highest buildings in town. God deserves our best, they believed, not our most convenient.
Something similar occurs in the work place. To be sure, for those who engage in manual labor, comfort is the apotheosis of workware. But for the rest of us, how we dress is one indication of how seriously we take our jobs. In the past at universities, for example, faculty wore their academic regalia every day. This performed two tasks. First, it again showed the seriousness of the academic endeavor. Second, it made a distinction between the professor and the student, that the former had authority over the latter. Still, if one looks at images of college students in the 1930s, most of whom were men, like the men at the ballpark they were in shirt and tie, “just” to go to class.
Recapturing the past is impossible and not totally desirable. Still, we could all think harder about how we dress and what message it sends to those around us. Dress is a form of communication. When we dress below our station or worse than circumstances dictate, what are we communicating? Modesty and formality in dress communicate a seriousness and maturity that circumstances often require.
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