I Can't Believe These Demons Wear Hokas to Work
At least the financiers of old had the respect to wear Italian leather.
Close your eyes and think about what you would consider “appropriate work attire.” For the purposes of this assignment, let’s assume that your work is a generally collaborative “white-collar” desk-and-office job, one that does not include regular visits to a warehouse, factory, or other facility in which specific attire is warranted. The physical demands of this job entail commuting to said office and then occasionally walking around it, or, in rare instances, lifting an object like a box of files or a computer monitor. Now open your eyes. Is anyone in this fantasy wearing running shoes? Are you wearing running shoes? God. Disgusting.
I couldn’t tell you where this comes from but I have a very specific set of beliefs about what should and should not be allowed in certain social situations. Clothes convey intent and position and meaning and mindset and often power. Appearances are important. That’s why to me it is personally humiliating that our current ruling class is largely dominated by the kind of guy who wears running shoes with jeans. Look around your average office today, the building block of corporate America. Are we talkin suits? No. There are people wearing those Lululemon “chinos” that are made to look like slacks but are actually constructed out of a kind of stretchy athleisure material. There are clothes companies selling collared shirts made to be untucked. There are those ungodly “dress shoe upper running shoe sole” things that I can’t even get into. And everywhere — everywhere! — there are Hokas.
I do not have anything against Hokas, like conceptually. Everyone I’ve spoken to says they’re a great running shoe. They look big and cushioned and comfortable, if a little bulky and ugly. But to work? Where you are not required to run, or be on your feet much? When you are standing in the office’s little galley getting a cup of coffee or complimentary bag of Boom Chicka Pop or gluten free pretzels? Running shoes? Really?
I don’t care about arch support, or comfort, or any of that. They make comfortable shoes that don’t make you look like one of the dorky sideline guys that runs out on the field during timeouts of football games to shoot water through the facemasks of the players with a squeezy-bottle thing. That is a job you can wear Hokas for. But middle management at a tech company or a “startup?” Financial services at a venture capital firm that is owned by founders under the age of 50? Have some goddamn self-respect. The guys down on Wall Street used to judge each other by the cut and quality of their suits and the leather of their shoes. Now even they are getting lax. It’s windbreakers and quarter-zip fleeces. I see those running shoe soles creeping in. They let you wear that shit at Goldman?
There are so many things wrong with the world right now that I imagine this sounds like a very trivial and frivolous complaint. I have many people in my life who have succumbed to running shoes with jeans, or slacks. I have seen it done by people I love. Many of our readers perhaps do it. But in the spirit of honesty I must admit that I hate it. You know what you are doing, right? You are conforming to a standard set by Mark Zuckerberg and his stupid grey t-shirts. Almost two decades ago, the ascendant tech world decided that more relaxed dressing standards were going to be the norm in their companies, ushering in a workplace era that generally eschewed the old ways of, you know, looking generally professional for your office job. I’m not totally against that! I like wearing casual clothes to work. But running shoes, Patagonia tech pants, fleece vests — I hate it. You can wear jeans and some boots or a non-running sneaker and a t-shirt. I don’t care! I don’t care about this that much! Honestly, a collared shirt would be nice — it doesn’t have to be a dress shirt. If you’ve caught a stray reading this blog, then I’m sorry. I don’t mean you. But honestly, would it kill you to invest in a pair of Chelsea boots? This is literally the reason that Uniqlo exists.
What bugs me is that clothes do have these connotations of power and status and intent. There are people in the world right now, many of whom used to work at tech companies, who are wielding tremendous power over the lives of millions. It bugs me that those people don’t at least have the impulse to dress the part! Wearing running shoes and techwear and everything else, to me, is wolves dressing up as particularly unfashionable sheep while they are ripping through the flock. I want to know who my enemies are, and right now I can’t tell them apart from my unfashionable friends. Does this make me a snob? Is there a lot of Psychology going on here? Sure. Whatever. But it says something to me that the centers of power in our world have shifted such that the next era of American capitalism will be driven in by dudes who look like they’re dressed to go play laser tag at a Dave and Busters. Just buy a pair of boots! God!
I feel like this is the first big whiff I've read on Discourse.
First of all, business attire sucks shit. It's expensive and uncomfortable and ugly and doesn't work in any climate. The shoes without exception hurt to wear for a whole day. For men the style has not changed at all for the last solid century except to cycle from slightly looser to slightly tighter silhouettes every decade or so.
But second and more salient, why do you want the people at the helm of the instruments of our repression dressing in a way that indicates command and authority? Let them wear ballcaps and t-shirts with blazers and cargo shorts. Let their intimidation factor be as close to zero as possible so we see them for the clowns they are and people aren't cowed out of organizing against them.
Who replaced Cros with my dad?