We can wear pants to work again.
Isn't that a relief?
Liz Tilberis certainly thinks it is.
Tilberis is editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar, one of America's leading fashion magazines. She is also, as she frequently points out, a working mother.
In many ways, I admire Tilberis. She obviously does a good job (it's a great-looking magazine) and, on a personal level, she has been forthright and consistently upbeat about having cancer and trying simultaneously to take care of her kids, do her work and get well.
If I met her, I bet I'd like her.
But when I read her, sometimes I think, OK, we're both working mothers, but not on the same planet.
That's how I felt when I read her essay in the August issue of Bazaar.
August, of course, is the start of the big fashion-magazine season, which continues pretty much unabated through Christmas. This year Tilberis has decided to dedicate the entire August issue to pants.
Hey, no problem there. I like pants, who doesn't? Though I grant you, I may not like them quite as passionately as Tilberis does.
"I love the khakis I've been wearing these past few weeks," she writes, but adds that pants do pose problems for a working mom. "Deciding which top and jacket go with which pants while getting two children ready for day camp every morning is the biggest pain. The whole effect should be casual to a degree but . . . you can't be sure. Ending up in the office and realizing that your clothes feel a little off is not a fabulous way to start the day. Ask any working mother."
OK, ask me (and believe me, I know I am one of the lucky ones. I can wear nearly anything to work and it's OK.) So, how do mothers who work outside the home decide which top and jacket go with which pants? Easy: choose the clean ones. They are always a match.
Also, ending up in the office and realizing that your clothes feel a little off is not the worst way to start the day.
The worst way to start the day is to come to office and find out that half your department is about to be laid off.
Maybe this never happens at Harper's; for the sake of all the moms and dads who work there, I hope it doesn't. But I suspect employment at a fashion magazine, particularly in its upper echelons, skews a women's perspective on what's really involved in getting dressed for work.
"Return," first of all, is a peculiar word in the context of pantsuits. If what we are talking about is some kind of combination of a pair of pants and a jacket, I don't think most (non-uniformed) working women were aware that it was gone. But OK, maybe it has been gone from the Hearst building; something must be behind Tilberis' breathless suggestion that, thanks to the "put-together, confident air" your simple new pantsuit will give you, "a little of the time you've saved in dressing can now be devoted to choosing a piece of jewelry."
What an intriguing perspective. Frankly, I would have supposed that if I were able to save a little time in dressing, I might devote it to eating breakfast - or, more likely, filling out a school form that was presumably in the house all night but remained buried in the bottom of a backpack until 7:25 a.m. Choosing jewelry? I am sure I could learn to love it. I could also learn to love daily massages, an Italian sports car and a live-in maid. Liz, I am willing to start anywhere on this list you think would be most helpful to me, as a working mother.
But besides Harper's, I've done a little other reading this month, including a pretty interesting report from the United States Department Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The report, published last year, is called "Women in the Workforce: An Overview." It's not as dull as it sounds. On the other hand, it's 19 pages long, so let's skip to the main point.
In 1994, the year that the report examined, nearly 6 out of 10 women aged 16 and over were in the workforce. Among women aged 25 to 54 (the big working-mother age group), 75 percent either worked or looked for work. By 1994, women were so entrenched in the American labor force that it included over half the women with children under the age of 1.
So there's no doubt that there are plenty of women who work outside the home, many of them mothers, almost none of them naked. (Demi Moore is not, by herself, a statistically significant sample.)
Their median income: just under $21,000 a year.
Now, that's not quite as bad as it sounds. The wage gap is slowly closing. By 1994, women who worked were making about 76% of the median for men; in 1979, women who worked full time earned only 63% as much as men did.
Why does any difference persist? One of the big reasons, according to the report, is that nearly 60% of women in the workforce are concentrated in services, sales and clerical jobs, "which often pay lower than average."
Think many women in those jobs are in the market for a $3,000 outfit?
For that matter, what woman does earn enough to go to work in an ensemble that costs more than a new refrigerator? How much would you have to earn before that didn't sound plain crazy?
A lot more than anybody I know.
And even if you could afford it, wouldn't you feel ridiculous? Maybe not if you worked at Harper's Bazaar, where the employees are probably held to a higher-than-usual fashion standard. But wear something like that on most jobs, and watch your professional status evaporate. Why not simply announce to your co-workers, "I really don't have to be here." It would be more to the point.
Yet these clothes exist - work outfits that almost no one who works could afford to wear, or would dare to. Who are they really for?
I guess I can see what Liz Tilberis is up against. Nobody can come right out and say,"If you are rich and idle, and have never heard of the concept of charity, then why not have fun dressing in clothes that make it look as if you spend your time at an office. What a lark that would be!"
Mulling it over, it seems to me that this is not a brand-new, fall '96 fashion idea.
I can think of at least one working woman who dressed in just that way.
Her job? She was the last queen of France.
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