The Post-Pandemic Dress Code, Plus Hilton Als on Alice Neel

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When a very long year of doing business from home—in sweatshirts and pajamas and slippers—is over, how much effort will people be willing to expend on dressing for the office? Richard Thompson Ford, a law professor and the author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History,” tackles that question along with the New Yorker editor Henry Finder. Clothing, he says, has mostly been used to maintain social hierarchies, but it has also occasionally helped to overthrow them. Dressing up, he says, can be a form of transgression: historically, in Black communities, refined dress has been used to demand dignity and resist white supremacy. Plus, the celebrated critic Als on the work of Alice Neel, who painted her neighbors, friends, and colleagues in a multicultural New York.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.6	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, over the past year, during the long
0:16.2	pandemic, your relationship with your clothes closet has probably changed a little bit.
0:24.0	I am wearing a hoodie and sweatpants and flip-flops.
0:30.6	I mean, come on.
0:32.1	I've only worn clothes that can go in the washer dryer.
0:35.9	I believe that I described my clothing choices to my employer as sackware.
0:41.2	In addition to the already current face mask, I am adding a more design-friendly second face mask.
0:49.2	And one of those, in particular, is this Jurassic Park,, Samuel L. Jackson one that has him saying,
0:55.6	hold on to your butts. I like to dress up. Ever since the pandemic happened, I have personally
1:03.0	found myself dressing in a more formal way. I put on jeans in the morning. It just makes me feel like still a citizen of the world.
1:15.9	But now those of us who are working at home, and that's more than half of working Americans, at least part-time,
1:22.0	we're starting to think about what going back to the office will be like. What exactly is it going to be? And we're thinking about
1:29.0	all this with a measure of trepidation. I'm reluctantly going to retire my outdoor slippers,
1:35.4	which differ from my indoor slippers. Dresses. I don't know if I'm down with them anymore. I really
1:41.7	don't. I don't think I'm going to miss anything about my pre-pandemic
1:45.7	wardrobe. I think I'm one of the strange ones who enjoyed wearing a face mask everywhere.
1:52.0	You know, I enjoyed looking like an old time banding at the grocery store and even at the bank.
1:58.0	I have these beautiful dresses. They're really sweet.
2:04.9	I'm in my closet right now, and there's this polka dot dress that I love, and this other dress that has, like, vine patterns.
2:07.3	I want to wear those again.
2:08.8	I am so tired of trying to put on a pair of skinny jeans that I cannot bend my knees in.
	...

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