Participating in the saratorial decline.

Note: The other day I did a long post on clothing standards.  In pasting together a couple of other lingering posts for a combined new topic (the one on retirement) I ran across this post.  Well, bummer, I just posted this one:

Declined Sartorial Standards. Have we gone too informal?

This one dates back to some time prior to May, given one of the references in it.

Well, I'll run it anyway.

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As a Wyoming lawyer, but a lawyer, I've watched the slow decline in clothing standards while participating in it.

At my first day of work in 1990 I reported to work wearing a double-breasted Brooks Brothers suit.  The first partner who came in was wearing wool khaki trousers and a blue blazer, and he was dressed down.  He told me that I didn't have to wear a suit every day.

For years and years, however, I normally wore a tie and clothing appropriate for a tie.  Then COVID 19 hit.

For much of the prior spike of the disease (we're in a spike now, of the unvaccinated, but of course the entire state disregarding that) I kept coming in the office.  I was often the only one there when we were at the point where the staff didn't have to come in.  I pretty much quit dressing in office dress at the time as there wasn't much of a reason to do it.  Nobody was coming in, I was there by myself, what the heck.

I've not made it back to normal, and not everyone else has, either.

And of course normal in 2019 was not the same thing it was in 1999, or 2009.  We'd already slid down the dressing scale in the back of the office, where I am.  I never used to wear blue jeans in the office, but by 2019 I already was a fair amount.  Starting with COVID 19, I am all the time.

One of the things about that is that in 2019 I already had a selection of older dress clothes that were wearing out, I hadn't replaced.  Probably the inevitability of their demise would have caused me to replace them on in to 2020.  But I didn't have to.  Additionally, the long gap in time meant that I pretty much didn't do anything about the fact I'm down to two suits now.

Two suits isn't much if you are a trial lawyer.

Well, running up to the trial, I was going to go down to Denver and get new ones.  But I ran out of time.  I still haven't done it.

I need to.

I'll confess that part of my reluctance to get new suits is that I'm 58 years old.  I don't wear suits daily at work, and I'm not one of those guys who is going to claim "I'm going to work until I'm 80".  Any new suit I get now will still be in fighting shape when I'm 68, and that's reasonably enough, but to my cheap way of thinking, emphasized by the fact that I have two kids in college, its something that is both easy for me to put off, and in the back of my mind I tend to think "maybe I won't really need those if . . . "

Well, I probably better remedy that.