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Excerpt
from "Pride, prejudice and the not-so-subtle politics of the working
class" by Katherine Boo, published in The
Washington Post. March 14, 1993
"Let me put it to you this way" — Jimmy Killens is getting testy — "let's say I'm real hungry and you're going to take me to some fancy restaurant — say Mr. K's — right now. You're buying. Well, listen, I'm not going. Forget it. I wear a uniform, so it doesn't matter that I make an honest wage. I'm looked down on in this town. A uniform — it says you're nothing." "Why must holding certain jobs involve restricting down to the drawers one of life's most intuitive freedoms — choosing how you will look to the rest of the world?" (ask Mr. Killens) In fact, so many working people are now asking that question that a backlash is quietly building — one that may in time upend America's tradition of forcing low-status workers to dress down to move up. In America, our sartorial class markers are pretty complicated ones. Seniors at Washington's Anacostia High School wear more gold jewelry than seniors at Sidwell Friends; Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan do grunge. The work uniform, though — nothing complicated about it. Long one of America's great status giveaways, it is today even more precise in what it reveals. During the past few decades, nurses, doctors, nuns and other upscale uniform-wearers of old eagerly peeled theirs off for more flexible clothing, leaving the uniform largely the province of the trades and service classes. However, fashion anthropologists have repeatedly found that people in suits tend to be accorded more respect and better service than people in other clothes. Even nurses, who have sat at the top of the uniform heap in terms of social status, reported an increase in respect from doctors and patients after they shed their angel-of-mercy whites. But you really don't need social science or cultural criticism to understand why service- and blue-collar industry shorthand for moving into management ranks isn't "I'm getting a desk," but "I'm getting my tie." "To wear a uniform," writes novelist Alison Lurie, "is to give up your right to free speech in the language of clothes....In America, clothing is one of the more financially accessible means of masking one's social station. It's cheaper to buy Nikes than a Saab."
Copyright 1999, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Company and The Washington Post. All rights reserved.
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Mr.
Killens has spent the last quarter century wearing the Colonial
Parking insignia stenciled on the chest of his green polyester work
suit. But of course his uniform — like the work clothes inhabited
by 250,000 other D.C.-area janitors, waiters, pipe fitters, and
such — isn't really made for him at all. Rather, the working-class
uniform is made for the rest of us. When Mr. Killens takes our car
keys at a garage, when the gas man approaches the house, when the
Burger King cashier brings forth the fries, their uniforms provide
us with order, reassurance, split-second recognition. For the people
living inside those work suits, though, the uniform provides something
less comforting: daily instruction in the intricacies of social
class in America.
Behind
the gabardine twill and the soil-release finish lies a great status
hierarchy. Within most city office buildings in Washington, for
instance, browns, greens and blues mean maintenance workers, the
bottom rung; a step up is gray, conveying technical skill and more
substantial pay stubs. Similarly, across the spectrum of uniformed
occupations, some uniforms — police and military garb, pilots'
gear — are far more equal than others. Although UPS's brown
shirts may top uniform dealers' list of ugliest outfits, to service-industry
cognoscenti they signify a secure job that pays real money.
