Ben Stein wrote a piece in the Sunday Times -- Hey, Guys, Hairy Knees Are for the Beach, Not the Office -- advocating more conservative dress as a benefit not just for stylistic reasons, but as just "good business":

To put it as boldly as it needs to be put, men at work these days all too often dress like total slobs, and it hurts the eyes, the spirit and, I suspect, the bottom line.

Sometimes, I get a clue of this when I go to see my lawyer and am shocked to find that men who should be wearing suits - to keep up their propriety and their sense of dignity - are wearing casual jeans and short-sleeved shirts instead. I get a whiff of it when I appear on television and see employees of major networks dressed in casual slacks and sport shirts with no ties.

But the most stunning blow came a few weeks ago when I did an industrial film on a super-advanced videoconferencing system made by a very large, very successful high-tech company. The men who worked at the company's campus in Oregon were uniformly smart and uniformly courteous, but they dressed like children at summer camp - cut-off jeans, shorts, T-shirts and sandals without socks. I asked if this was some special dress-down day and they all looked at me as if I were insane. "No," they said. "This is how we dress."

Well, you aren't insane, Ben; but you are advocating (implicitly) that people should be wearing ritualized clothing to work -- clothing styles that have literally nothing to do with the job, like hospital whites for doctors, or coveralls for mechanics -- but which serve... what purpose exactly?

Basically, men's suits -- which is what Ben wants to see us wearing -- are a holdover from the bourgeois clothing of the 1800s in Europe, when a growing middleclass began to ape court dress in an attempt to establish itself as distinct from tradesmen and other workers that we would call blue collar today.

The sheer dumbness of men's suits are a holdover from design elements that may have made sense then, before central heating and indoor plumbing: like the phony buttons on the cuffs that don't really work, or the button hole in the left collar for which there is no corresponding button on the right, and the tie, which is a remnant of a scarf used to keep the neck warm in drafty halls.

One of the direct consequences of the mindset advocated by Stein is to label those who do not wear such extravagant and expensive get-up as being childish, or boorish. $1000 suits that require expensive dry cleaning, $500 shoes that require regular polishing, $100 shirts that require ironing, and so on -- these are simple, everyday barriers that define a caste -- the managerial caste -- and exclude others who do not wish to or are unable to play.

This is like the recent Fairchild Publications flap about flip-flops (see here) where summer interns at the publishing concern were directed by memo not to dress like fashionistas, despite working for fashion magazines. But the real subtext in both cases is older people trying to tell younger people how to act if they want to be perceived as grownup, based on some antique and perhaps completely senseless kind of etiquette.

Ben's closing represent the darkest perception of what is at work when younger generations simply disregard oldster's preconceptions about new ways of doing things -- new ways to communicate, organize, balance work and personal life, or dress:

A suit says discipline, maturity, style, respect for yourself and respect for the people you are meeting. Casual clothes say - well, the word "contempt" comes to mind, although maybe it's too harsh. Maybe just "too cool for school" is what I mean.

You can certainly tell that the neo-conservatives are in power when people suggest that deciding not to wear a suit denotes lack of respect or even contempt. Perhaps it is better to characterize it as a radical, even revolutionary act: not slobbishness, but an active rejection of the slavish conformism and caste-mindedness that seems to dominate the country, today.