Why revealing your twinkle toes is really putting your foot in it
Unless the weather has taken a serious downturn in your part of the country.
It’s also fair to predict that you’ll see more of the same tomorrow, at work.
Global warming is melting the ice caps. It’s also melting the dress codes in many companies.
In the past, nobody would have worn shorts to the office.
This year, however, businesses all over Ireland found female employees turning up for work in a variation of hot pants. Re-branded as “city shorts”, these tended to be cuffed and reach to the knee or as near as damn to the knee. They still filled older employees and customers with a mixture of fascination and rage. Particularly when worn over naked legs.
Sunshine, instant tan lotion and spray-on leg make-up may turn white legs golden, but they’re still naked, and that, to traditionalists, is unacceptable in the workplace: God gave us tights to prevent legs walking around starkers.
The meltdown of the dress code is a worldwide phenomenon, serious enough for the Wall Street Journal to address on its front page, this weekend.
“After fielding a barrage of calls from regional managers this summer,” the newspaper notes, “Steve Keyes, human-resources manager officer at Nationwide Mutual Insurance, faced a quandary: what to do about exposed midriffs in the office.
“Employees at the Columbus, Ohio, insurer were increasingly turning up for work in low-cut tank tops, flip-flops and blouses with spaghetti straps. Managers worried that this attire was creating an unprofessional work environment. So three weeks ago, Nationwide rewrote its dress code, banning its 35,000 employees from wearing midriff-bearing tops, T-shirts and flip-flops.”
The wearers of these items, of course, maintain that comfort is the issue, especially in buildings in Ireland which have little or no air conditioning. They lie. Comfort is never the issue.
If it was, Spandex would never have been invented (Spandex is that rubbery stretch fabric that clings to every curve like an abbreviated wet-suit and makes its wearer sweat like a boxer). Those elements of the workforce hit by tougher dress codes claim that their actual work performance is the same, whether they’re wearing flip-flops on otherwise naked feet or tights-and-business pumps.
They say that if other staffers’ work performance drops as a result of them being distracted by a naked leg or two, this says more about them than about the flip-flop wearers. It’s a fair point — but holds no water at all with those who must prevent wardrobe malfunctions in the office.
Inevitably, when a dress code gets poked awake, it tends to bite female members of the workforce more than the male of the species. Most dress codes, dissected, direct more attention to preventing female display than to tidying up lads, partly because the range of errors perpetrated by men is smaller. Once you’ve taken care of basic hygiene, prevented the wearing of T-shirts showing green lizards having sex in a variety of positions, and banned jeans, there’s not much else a man can do to bring the office into visual disrepute, especially now platinum-tipped hair is gone out of style. Women, on the other hand, present an ever-changing canvas of potential breaches of office dress codes.
That said, I did get a phone call from a media outlet this week asking for my view of a male politician who had been seen wearing socks with sandals.
What, the journalist wanted to know, did this say about the politician? The answer clearly sought was: this politician is out of touch with his electorate, none of whom would be seen dead wearing socks and sandals, and so his chances of reelection are small. If I’d given the right answer, the pictures of the man involved would have run as often as the shots of the leader of the Conservatives wearing his Converse sneakers, with captions indicating how naff he is.
The wrong but truthful answer is that nobody has yet designed a sandal for a man which doesn’t look ridiculous, and a man who wears socks inside those sandals may be unfashionable, but is to be greatly preferred over one who exposes his naked feet. All naked feet over the age of 14 months are bad. Naked feet belonging to men are sick-makingly ugly. I’ve never met a tolerable naked adult male foot, and I’ve been studying the species since Religious Knowledge classes at school.
The old catechism had pictures of key Gospel figures without shoes on.
None of them had the decency to hide their repellent feet, even though some of them were standing on clouds and could easily have hid their toes behind a cumulus curve. In addition, most of them stood in a way that separated their big toes from the other toes, which made them look assertive in a Biblical way. But at least they all had the same kind of neat appropriate feet.
This is not what you find when today’s man reveals his nude appendages.
Some men have hair sprouting out of their toes. Some men have big toes like heads: the bit before the toe joins the foot is narrow, like a neck.
This looks worse when the big toe leans to one side, like a head listening to an iPod. Some men have cringy little toes that try to hide underneath the others. Some men have long pale skinny feet with bones and tendons clearly delineated beneath the skin, so every move is an anatomy lesson.
Some have broad fat self-satisfied feet that look as if they were inflated each morning.
But at least for 10 months of the year, men’s feet are hidden liabilities.
Women’s feet, by contrast, present a problem for a much longer period, because women, post Sex and the City, spend at least half the year in strappy sandals. Those high-heels offer the advantage of displaying the wearer’s French pedicure, which of course drives older bosses nuts. Those older bosses may not say it, but they secretly refuse to see chief executive or party leader potential in any woman who would waste time and money getting that done to her feet.
The ultimate extreme of trying to control what women wear at work through a dress code was presented by a man who mooted the corporate possibility of banning cleavage. No, not that kind of cleavage. Toe cleavage. He wanted women in his company to wear shoes that didn’t show the beginnings of their toes.
He must be having an awful time, this long, hot summer.
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