Episode 108: There’s No Dressing Up Dress Codes

The New York Yankees’ recent relaxation of half-century-old rules about facial hair got Joe to thinking about dress and codes generally.  Why do they exist?  Where do they come from?  Mark takes Joe on a historical tour of dress codes, from ancient Rome and China through medieval Europe and Tudor England, ending in the modern era of school uniforms and casual Fridays.  As our heroes discover, attire-related restrictions are less about affirming people than about keeping them in place, serving as effective instruments of social or class control—and sometimes symbols of resistance. (Recorded March 14, 2025.)

Transcript

Joe
Welcome to Mansplaining, a podcast about the interesting things you can discover if you just take the time to learn. My name is Joe, I'm your host for this week, and as always I'm joined by my college friend Mark. Together we'll explore what's on our minds and hopefully figure out a thing or two about a thing or two. Mark, this week's episode is about dress codes and grooming codes, I guess. And it's inspired, as I told you at the end of the last episode, by the New York Yankees' recent announcement that they were relaxing the facial grooming code, which I always thought was a ridiculous relic of a bygone era. But that news got me thinking about dress codes and grooming codes generally. And I've always thought of them as instruments of control, but I wanted you to take a look at the history of them and basically tell us why they exist and where they came from and whether the people who implement them believe they're doing so for helpful reasons or whether this is, as I suspect, an instrument of control. So I sent you off on that task, and we're back now, and I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about this. Take it away.

Mark
Well, thank you for the question. This one sent me down many, many paths that wound through history and culture, and it surfaced far too much interesting detail to discuss today. But I hope that I managed at least to pull together enough of it to tell an interesting and illuminating story.

Joe
I'm sure you did. You always do.

Mark
You mentioned the Yankees' facial hair policy, which dates back to 1976, when then-owner George Steinbrenner believed that it was important to instill a sense of discipline and order in the team that he'd purchased three years before. He implemented a policy that banned beards, long hair, and sideburns while allowing mustaches, and that policy stood for nearly 50 years.

Joe
On its face, it's just ridiculous. A beard is a sign of disorder or a lack of discipline, But a mustache is a sign of control and order, right? Yes. Bullshit.

Mark
Whenever I see a man with a mustache, I think, there goes a well-ordered man. But as we'll see, Sandbrenner's crusade against sideburns was one small part of a very long history of authority figures attempting to exert control over other people's clothing and hair. Restrictions on dress go back a long way, at least as far as the Roman Republic. The term we use for such restrictions, sumptuary laws, in fact comes from the Latin sumptu ariae leges, which were laws aimed to curb luxury and extravagance, often on moral or religious grounds. In ancient Rome, sumptuary laws dictated whose clothing could be made of silk or dyed purple. Citizens were supposed to wear plain togas, while senators wore togas with purple borders. Hair was also a social signifier. Elaborate hairstyles signaled a woman's social standing, and to underscore the point, many wealthy women had jewels woven into their hair. Aristophanic Roman women came to be known for displays of wealth so ostentatious that in 215 BC a law was passed restricted women from wearing multicolored garments, especially if they were trimmed in purple. But it didn't work. 200 years later, the Emperor Augustus again felt the need to reign in ostentatious displays of wealth with a new set of subjury laws. And it wasn't just in the West. Around the same time period in China, a strikingly similar set of regulations were in effect. Officials wore specific colors and embroidered motifs, a crane for civil servants and a tiger for generals, while peasants were required to wear coarse hemp with no frills. The Han Dynasty in China, which was in power from 206 BC until 220 CE, formalized these distinctions with the Yanfu system, where clothing colors, decorative patterns, and even the number of ornaments one could wear were supposed to directly correspond to your rank and social position. Black represented the highest status, while commoners were restricted to earth tones. Hairstyles were also regulated. Men were required to wear their hair in a top knot called a qi, and cutting one's hair was considered disrespectful to one's parents, since the body was seen as a gift from them. These appearance codes were so fundamental to Chinese identity that when the Manchu Qing Dynasty conquered China in 1644, they forced Han Chinese men to adopt the characteristic Manchu hairstyle, a shaved forehead with a long braid, as a visible sign of submission to the new rulers.

Joe
What I'm hearing so far is dress code like as a marker of social status. Yes. Is that right?

Mark
Yes, very often. And occasionally on moral grounds, dress code as a way of keeping you from going completely nuts to show how wealthy you were. In medieval and renaissance Europe, the emergence of a wealthy merchant class was beginning to blur traditional class lines, and Christian authorities viewed extravagant clothing as morally corrupting, so sumptuary laws were enacted to promote modesty and curb decadence while also reinforcing social hierarchies. These laws restricted luxury fabrics and accessories to the nobility to prevent commoners from imitating higher-status members of society. For instance, in 14th century England, King Edward III decreed that only royalty could wear purple silk or gold cloth, while commoners were limited to rough woolens and linens. In Venice, meanwhile, the city enacted 42 pieces of sumptuary legislation over the course of two centuries, detailing exactly what each social class could wear down to how much lace or gold thread was allowed. Meanwhile, in Florence, women were allowed to own only one string of pearls and four dresses for wearing in public, of which only one dress could be red. So the dangerous red dress was even known back in medieval Florence.

Joe
Oh, yes. The lady in red. Exactly. And I was thinking, no dressing up is what this sounds like, right? Exactly. Dress at your class level, but don't dare dress up.

Mark
Yes. Subtry laws in medieval Japan also emerged alongside the development of a wealthy merchant class. The Tokugawa shogunate enforced strict laws that dictated the types of clothing permissible for each social class with the goal of maintaining the superiority of the samurai class. For example, wearing swords in public was strictly restricted to samurais, and although high-status merchants were eventually allowed to wear a single sword as a signifier of their social standing, Samurai were required to wear a matched pair when on official duty to set them apart. When European powers colonized other lands, they brought the dress codes with them, and controlling the appearance of the colonized became one of their tools of domination. In the Spanish colonies, for instance, a caste system was reinforced through dress codes. Indigenous people were forbidden from wearing European clothing, while those of mixed ancestry were required to dress according to a system of racial classifications.

Joe
I'm a little surprised by that, Mark, because I know there were things like the Carlisle Indian School where they would try to get the American Indians to wear Western clothing. But maybe that happened later in the 19th and 20th centuries, and you're talking about the 17th and 18th centuries?

Mark
Well, what I just mentioned was specific to Spanish colonies, and what you described was also a practice in other areas. For instance, in British India, the colonizers imposed their ideas of proper appearance along the lines that you described. British officials required Indian civil servants to adopt Western-style haircuts while banning traditional head coverings in government offices. And there the message was clear. If you wanted to advance in colonial society and you're Indian, you had to renounce your cultural heritage in order to do so. So that was quite similar to the treatment of Native Americans of requiring them to abandon traditional dress in order to assimilate.

Joe
Yeah, assimilation or else.

Mark
Yes. School uniforms have a somewhat ambiguous place in our story. The modern concept of school uniforms began to take shape in the early 1800s, particularly in Britain. Initially, uniforms were introduced in institutions like grammar schools and boarding schools as a way to instill discipline and unity among students. These early uniforms were part of the broader educational reforms of the period, which aimed to standardize schooling and promote moral and academic rigor. Over time, though, the practice spread beyond elite institutions to public schools and eventually across various educational systems worldwide. In the United States, while uniforms were less common in public schools for many years, they became a staple in private institutions and were later adopted by many public schools, particularly in urban areas. And proponents argued that uniforms could help bridge socioeconomic divides by minimizing outward signs of wealth and poverty. By requiring students to dress alike, uniforms removed a visible marker of social and economic differences.

Joe
I've also heard the theory about school uniforms, especially in low-income, impoverished places, as being kind of inspiring to feel self-respect and to feel like you're a part of the thriving society.

Mark
Right. Yeah, could be. But critics of school uniforms argue that enforcing a standard dress code stifles individuality and self-expression, serving as an authoritarian restriction on statements of personal identity and free choice. Critics contend that while the intent behind uniforms may be to foster equality, the outcome is a homogenized environment where differences are not erased but simply hidden from view. And this has led to cause for more flexible dress codes that balance the need for order with a desire for individual expression. Some schools have experimented with policies that allow for a degree of personalization, such as permitting certain accessories or variations in uniform style to mitigate the loss of individuality while retaining the benefits of standard dress code. I never went to schools that had a dress code. First time I saw that was when I came to Chicago and I saw some school kids walking around in their uniforms. Do you know of anyone who had to dress the same when they went to school?

Joe
Yeah. I mean, I went to a public high school, so I never had a dress code like that. But there were kids who I grew up with who went to the Catholic Jesuit high schools, and they dressed in uniforms, the girls' high school and the boys' high school.

Mark
Yeah. That reminds me of a funny memory I have from living in Chicago is there was a Catholic school in the area in my neighborhood. And one day I saw a mother walking her young daughter to school. And the daughter, of course, was dressed in the Catholic schoolgirl outfit, looked very prim and proper. And the mother was dressed head to toe in skin-tight black leather. It was like, that mother, when she didn't have to wear the uniform anymore, she was ready for some self-expression.

Joe
Yes. Which kind of undercuts the message, if you think about it, right? Like the mother's a walking advertisement for the moral bankruptcy The autopsy of the uniform student. Right. Yeah.

Mark
The modern American workplace also has a long history of what scholars have come to call appearance politics. The corporate uniform of the mid-20th century, gray suits for men and modest skirts for women, wasn't just about professionalism. It was also about enforcing conformity and suppressing individual cultural expression. Women faced and still face contradictory demands. They're expected to appear attractive, but not too attractive. Feminine, but not frivolous. Put together, but not overly made up. For men, the control was different, but still strict. A short, neat haircut became synonymous with reliability and trustworthiness. And during the 50s and 60s, men with long hair were routinely denied service, housing, and employment. IBM's dress code required employees to wear white shirts and dark suits and created a visual shorthand for corporate America that persisted for decades. Corporate dress codes have relaxed in many industries, but new, subtler forms of appearance control are so apparent. The term business casual began to appear in the 1980s and reflected a blend of traditional business wear with a more relaxed style, and casual Friday became popular in the 1990s. The casual tech workplace uniform of hoodies and jeans that's now dominant in many industries may appear democratic, but it's still built on a foundation of conformity. Corporate appearance norms now extend beyond the workplace into online spaces. The COVID pandemic brought video conferencing into the mainstream and created new expectations about how employees should present themselves even when they're at home. Companies have issued guidelines about employee dress codes for virtual meetings, extending institutional control into private spaces where previously you were allowed to dress as you placed. And this has become very personal to me recently as I've been applying for jobs where the standard job interview these days is over a Zoom call. And so I have to put a considerable amount of thought going into that first interview and how I should dress because I want to seem respectable. But I also do not want to be overdressed. I don't want to show up in a suit if everyone there wears hoodies because you want to seem like you belong in that community.

Joe
Yes. And when it comes to Zoom interviews, there's also the background to be consider it as well, but that's a different podcast. I'm glad you mentioned COVID though, because I wanted to say that my sense is that the gradual relaxation of dress codes that had already been happening before COVID was kind of accelerated during COVID. And the era of remote work has given people even more reason to kind of abandon the dress codes of the past. At least that's my impression. Maybe this gradual return to work is going to change that. But we seem to be in the loosey-goosey phase of the dress code era that I can remember in my lifetime. I wonder if you agree with that.

Mark
Oh, yeah. In general, things got relaxed during the pandemic. There was a time when if you're on a call and people could hear your dog barking or your kid crying in the background that that was a faux pas. And people made a point, since we were all in it together, to give grace for that sort of thing. And I think it did extend also to your appearance, that we're all in the same boat. So we understood sometimes it's difficult to be at your absolute best when being at home while you're working involves additional challenges beyond your work. So I agree. As people get called back into the office, maybe we'll see the old standards reasserted, or maybe it'll be like a fusion of the lax standards of the pandemic and the strict standards of before, something in the middle.

Joe
Right. I'm also glad you mentioned the word conformity because that's a really important concept in a discussion like this. My very pat conclusion at the beginning was this is an instrument of control, but it's also an instrument of conformity. Yeah. Yeah. Dress codes.

Mark
Yeah. Like I talked about before on the job interview, I want to look like I fit in. I want to seem like a member of a group that I'm hoping to join. And so it's a way of signaling a desire for acceptance to dress like the people around you.

Joe
Yes.

Mark
But to sum up so far, my first answer to your question, Joe, is that yes, restrictions on dress and hairstyle have very often been used as an instrument of social control. That practice started in antiquity and it continues to this day. But it's also true that there's a flip side to that equation. When a society elevates a certain style of dress or style of hair as normal or privileged, it creates an opportunity for resistance. That's to say, deliberately looking the wrong way can be used to signal a rejection of the ruling order.

Joe
During

Mark
the French Revolution, there was a group of militant revolutionaries known as the Saint-Culat, who rejected the aristocratic knee breeches, which were called culottes, in favor of working-class trousers. Their name, literally meaning without breeches, became their identity, transforming what had been a mark of lower status into a proud political statement of opposition to the aristocracy and everything it stood for. They also wore red liberty caps, which they'd adapted from those worn by freed slaves in ancient Rome, to visually connect their struggle against the French ruling class to historical fights against oppression. In 1960s America, the civil rights and black power movements embraced natural African hairstyles as political statements. The Afro wasn't just a hairstyle, but a declaration that black is beautiful. And when activist Angela Davis sported an iconic afro, it became more than personal style. It was a rejection of white beauty standards and an embrace of black identity. Notably, FBI descriptions of Davis made prominent mention of her hairstyle, underscoring its threatening symbolic power. Women's liberation movements have repeatedly used appearance as protest. When flappers in the 1920s cut their hair into bobs, raised their hemlines, and discarded their corsets, they were rejecting Victorian ideals of femininity and claiming new freedoms. Similarly, when feminists in the 1960s burned bras and rejected makeup, they were challenging the commodification of women's bodies and the unequal burden of beauty standards. Also in the 60s and 70s, countercultural movements challenged traditional dress norms, with beards and relaxed clothing styles symbolizing rebellion and individuality. George Steinbrenner thinking that the Yankees wear a bunch of long hairs is one good example of a widespread criticism of long-haired men in the 60s and 70s, which was an attempt by mainstream society to enforce conformity and suppress dissenting expressions during a period in American history when the status quo was being called into question. Modern dress codes evolved significantly as society entered the digital age, with social media platforms lending themselves to new norms around fashion and appearance. The rise of gender-fluid fashion has challenged traditional binaries, with celebrities like Harry Styles wearing dresses on magazine covers and clothing brands increasingly releasing unisex collections. So there's a second answer to your question. Sometimes attempts to put rules around hair and dress can lend themselves to symbolic resistance to authority. And then there's the fact that when we're talking about dress codes and resistance to authority, it can be tricky to identify which authority is being resisted. Restrictions on styles of dress and hair while simple on their face can actually be quite complex in practice. And this is why I'd like to close with a discussion of the burqa and hijab, which have long been at the center of debate surrounding religious dress in Muslim societies. The practice of covering the hair and body can be found in various cultures throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. However, with the rise of Islam in the 7th century, the hijab and other forms of veiling became integrated into religious and cultural practices. While the Quran advises modesty, it does not prescribe a single uniform style of dress. Over time, different regions developed their own distinctive practices. The hijab, which is often a simple headscarf, came to be associated with modesty and dignity for Islamic women, and was identified as a personal expression of faith that signaled adherence to cultural and religious norms that prioritized humility and privacy. The burqa, which covers the entire body, including the face, emerged in some regions as an extension of these ideals, influenced by local traditions and interpretations of modesty. In many Muslim-majority societies, these garments are valued as symbols of piety, respect, and cultural identity. In Western societies, the burqa and hijab have been lightning rods that evoke polarized interpretations. Critics argue that the burqa is a visible manifestation of misogyny, a tool that perpetuates gender inequality by locking women away from the public gaze while their husbands and fathers are allowed to dress as they please. This antagonistic perspective frequently references the patriarchal traditions and restrictive social norms common in certain Muslim societies and interprets the burqa as one such instrument of oppression. For critics, the burqa is not a simple choice. It's a symbol of systemic control that limits a woman's participation in public life. On the other side of the debate, many non-Muslim advocates for religious and cultural freedom contend that the hijab and even the burqa in some instances can represent an expression of agency. They argue that banning such garments would be a paternalistic imposition that disregards the personal and religious convictions of the women who wear them. In this view, the choice to wear hijab or burqa can be seen as a form of empowerment, a deliberate, self-affirming decision by devout Muslim women to align their appearance with their beliefs. It's challenging to understand the role of the burqa in hijab because of this tension between choice and coercion. In many Muslim societies, the decision to wear these garments can be complex. Strong cultural and familial expectations place burdens on women that call into question how free they are to choose what they wear. The protests in Iran against wearing the hijab makes it quite clear that for many Muslim women, these restrictions on the dress come from outside authority, not from their own convictions. In the West, this complexity is compounded by the dominant secular ideals and realities of living in a multicultural society. For instance, when in 2010 French lawmakers instituted bans on overt religious symbols, including the hijab, the policy was justified on the grounds that they were acting to promote secularism and social cohesion. Yet such bans have been criticized for marginalizing Muslim women, effectively forcing them to choose between conforming to Western norms or their own cultural identity. Critics argue that these prohibitions are not about liberating women from oppression, but rather about enforcing a homogenized public space that privileges a specific secular vision of citizenship and normalizes Western styles of dress. The various interpretations of the Burkahan job in Western contexts are likewise entangled with broader political and social debates about identity, integration, and modernity. For some critics, these governments evoke a broad set of anxieties about immigration, multiculturalism, and the visibility of Islamic traditions in the West. They argue that an immigrant's assimilation into their new home country should involve leaving the traditions of their home country behind. On their hand, many Muslim women assert that Western society promises freedom and personal autonomy, and so they should be free to choose what to wear. For them, wearing the hijab, or maybe even the burqa, could serve as an act of reclaiming their identity. In short, the brick of hijab show us a third way of looking at dress codes. We've seen how they can serve as instruments of control, and we've seen how they can serve as acts of resistance. And now we can see that sometimes they can be both at exactly the same time. The long and complicated history of dress codes and hairstyle standards reminds us that what appears superficial is often deeply political. Whether or not those 1976 New York Yankees might have grown long hair and sideburns as acts of defiance against social convention, Steinbrenner's ban of such things was an openly political act. One small episode in humanity's ongoing negotiation of power through personal appearance. And exploring this topic helped me realize a fundamental truth that I don't know I fully recognized before. Our bodies are never neutral spaces. They are canvases where social values, power structures, and resistance are visibly enacted every day. From ancient Roman togas to corporate uniforms, from revolutionary red caps to the modern hijab, how we present ourselves physically has always been a form of communication about who has power and who deserves it. Human bodies and how they are presented have been battlegrounds for thousands of years, and they are likely to remain so for another thousand more. So Joe, I've been thinking, what better way for you to signal your opposition to the current regime in Washington than to grow a big pair of mutton chop sideburns in protest. What do you think?

Joe
Well, they would be white gray mutton chops and would make me look like Goose Gossage. Well, maybe that's not a bad thing, but I'm opposed to facial hair right now because it will make me look so old, but that's my own personal thing. I like your last point a lot about bodies as canvas, and that is worth thinking about more. I silenced myself so you could finish your points, but I have a lot of things to say about this. Beginning with the arguments about the burqa and hijab, I take your point about how it's an example of simultaneous control and the resistance to control. I understand why you segregated that, but I really agree with the critics of the burqa that this is the ultimate example of dress as an instrument of control, a patriarchal society. But where I go with that is that let's not pat ourselves on the back too much in Western societies because we also have patriarchs running the show here. And I feel like anti-abortion measures are, for many people who believe in them, thinly disguised methods of controlling women's autonomy and their bodies. So I believe in our own lawmaking and policy debates, we're displaying a lot of the same forms of patriarchal control that our so-called enemies, so-called benighted Muslims are.

Mark
Yeah. I confess that as a white male progressive, I am profoundly troubled by burqas. I remember an incident, I think it was last summer here in Seattle, where I was walking in the park and I came on a Muslim family, a husband, his wife, and their baby in a stroller. And the wife was in a full burqa and the husband was in shorts and Birkenstocks. I found that kind of appalling. And I am deeply troubled by the notion that women in Muslim societies exert total freedom in what they're able to wear because of expectations that are put on them. But I'm equally troubled by the notion that I, as a white male, am in a position to tell that woman what she's supposed to wear. I know the limits of my own understanding and the proper limits of my own authority, and I realistically have no place in that conversation that's internal to that family. And yet, at the same time, I wish that she didn't have to dress that way on a summer day when undoubtedly it was unbearably hot inside that thing. So

Joe
really,

Mark
for me, the burqa is a contradiction that cannot be solved because it sets values that are intrinsic to how I view the world against each other. They contradict each other and they kind of cancel each other out. So in that section of the burqa, I really was trying to thread the needle of presenting the complexity of the conversation around it and also the complexity of where authority shows up there. Because there's the authority of the Western society and then there's authority within the family. There's the authority of secular society and the authority of religious tradition. And that these things overlap and conflict with one another and work at cross purposes. And it makes the discussion of the burqa just extremely difficult to navigate with any degree of clarity.

Joe
Yes. And I agree. And I think the laws they passed in France banning the hijab and burqa are extremely problematic for just the reasons you articulated. But I want to say one other thing about this subject before we leave it. And that is, you mentioned Iran. You know, Iran was a very cosmopolitan place not long ago, 40, 50 years ago. So when women demonstrate against the Muslim coverings there, they do so because their mothers and their grandmothers were allowed to dress like 20th century women not too long ago. And now their country's being run by theocrats who want to take them back to the 14th century. So I'm very sympathetic with those kind of demonstrations. And I think it's further evidence of my point of view that this is primarily an instrument of control. Yeah. But we can move on. I have a lot of other things to mention to you before we quit this subject. I think your presentation really got at the tension that's at the core of this subject, which I would say is that dress and personal grooming are and always have been modes of expression, personal expression. And yet dress and grooming codes are instruments of control. So there's that inherent tension between the need to express yourself and the controlling forces that

Mark
tamp

Joe
down your expression.

Mark
Yeah, both of which are rooted in the fact that dress and hair are modes of self-expression. They're your personal billboard, which you can use to advertise any number of things. And there are some things that the government would prefer that you not say.

Joe
Yes. And as you mentioned briefly earlier about the tensions after the 1960s into the 1970s, I'm old enough to remember the catcalls I got from some relatives when I decided to grow my hair over my ears in the early 1970s. I think I was in second grade when I finally talked my parents into letting me do it. And I had uncles and other people in school say, cut your hair, kid, you look like a girl. And also, I remember that. Crew cuts were still very commonplace then. And that's why I have this kind of visceral negative reaction to dressing grooming codes. I'm sure that informs it.

Mark
Yeah. I remember one day, it was while I was in graduate school, I'd grown my hair pretty long, and I think I had a scraggly beard. And I was home from school for Christmas break, and I was just sort of wandering through the store. And I realized from this monitor that the security camera in the store was following me every step of the way around the interior of that store. Because apparently my long hair, my scruffy look tagged me as someone who was likely to shoplift something.

Joe
And

Mark
at the time the You

Joe
got profiled.

Mark
I got profiled. And at the time, the crowning irony there was I was a student in divinity school and they were following me around. I was probably the most innocent person in that store. But it underscores that they felt I was signaling something with that. And the reality was I was just a graduate student who was in a period of life where my appearance didn't really matter. And so I'd kind of let things go. But I had never felt more conspicuous by way of hair than I did on that day.

Joe
Well, let's stick with the long hair and the counterculture because I got a couple of questions for you from that part of your presentation. I wonder if in your reading or in your thinking about this, you drew the line between the counterculture in the late 60s and 70s actually leading to what I would call the ascendance of casual wear today. And I ask this question because I love to look at photos of old baseball games. And even in, of course, in the 1920s, everybody's in a suit and straw hats on the men. But even as late as the 1960s at an afternoon baseball game, men are still dressing in suits with ties, and women are still wearing dresses. And there was this huge change after that. And I wonder whether there's a straight line between the counterculture and our t-shirts and shorts and hoodies today.

Mark
It didn't come up in my research, but if I were to surmise something, It would be that the counterculture did lead to changes in fashion in the 70s, which you will remember, which is that flowers were on everything. And polyester jackets. Bell bottoms. Bell bottoms, polyester jackets with enormous lapels. And that was a cringeworthy expansion on sort of rebellious approaches to fashion in the later 60s. But it took root, and probably what happened after that is that the elite started to dress that way, and it began to filter down as more acceptable because it took root within parts of society that were admired.

Joe
Yes. Yeah, good point. And to your point about the ubiquity of that 1970s uniform, that's actually a good segue to my next question, which is, I'm wondering whether this same counterculture mutated or became its own suffocating culture that you couldn't deviate from. You know, hippies had their own uniform. And if you wore the wrong hippie uniform, you weren't embraced by the community of hippies. And so each mode of dress has its own suffocating culture attached to it. And what starts as a resistance to a dress code could itself become its own self-policing dress code. I mean, what do you think about that?

Mark
Oh, sure. Yeah. It always strikes me as a little humorous when I see a group of people walking together and within that group, they're all dressed exactly the same. As soon as a look emerges, then conformism becomes a thing because as soon as the look exists, then that's a way to signal your membership in a group is to dress that way. And so Yes. And who

Joe
knows, you and I may have dressed in our own very similar uniforms back in the day when we were hanging together in college. I'm thinking

Mark
of the Beatles and the Ed Sullivan show where they were dressed as proper young men in suits and ties. And imagine if in 1972, John Lennon had come out in a suit, people would have wondered what on earth happened. It would have seemed like a repudiation of everything that he stood for when in a more free society, he might have just decided, yeah, I look good in the

Joe
Yeah. Okay, one last question, and that is you trace the trajectory of dress codes, and at the beginning, they seemed really about markers of class status as we discussed. And I wonder whether that's still the case. Are modern dress codes still markers of class status or social status?

Mark
I think probably that it's now the brand that's the signifier of class. A rich man wears jeans and I wear jeans, but he wears a more expensive pair of jeans. I think we've segued into the brand as the signifier rather than the material which was the signifier before or the colors that were the signifier before. Maybe that's the capitalist version of that thing. We all get to dress in whichever colors that we want, but there are certain brands that are priced in order to be exclusive for the purpose of signifying that exclusivity.

Joe
That's interesting. I hadn't considered that. Probably is true, though, right? Rolex versus Timex is the marker of class status.

Mark
Right,

Joe
yeah. Okay, well, thank you for that. That was an interesting conversation. I'm waiting for the day when the dress codes are relaxed enough for me to wear V-neck jeans so I can let my junk breathe.

Mark
Yeah, I can't say that I'm welcoming that day as much as you are, but at least give me fair warning if you had done that route.

Joe
Okay, will do. But that is my dream. May as well let our listeners know.

Mark
Well,

Joe
you've got a question for me for next time, so hit me.

Mark
Okay, so lately I've been hearing a lot about quantum computing, which is the form of computing that makes use of quantum states of subatomic particles to store information. Quantum mechanics in general is a pretty crazy field, and quantum computers are supposed to be capable of calculations that, in a few minutes or hours, can accomplish things that today's computers would take thousands or millions of years to do. So far, quantum computing is something that research labs do. And the first quantum computers have been pretty rudimentary. I'm wondering what's going to happen when quantum computing really hits the scene. So my question for you, how might the lives of ordinary people change in the age of quantum computing? And is there any chance for that technology to arrive quickly enough for us to talk about it in a future episode of Mansplaining?

Joe
Good question. and I'm so glad you didn't ask me to explain quantum computing because there's no way in a million years I'd be able to do so but that's certainly an answerable question and has its time come is a really good question so I'll get on that for next time and you will hear us again in a couple of weeks as I go off and research that question but that's all for this episode of mansplaining. I am still Joe, and that was still Mark. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Mark
See you then.