Mandy's ITP Blog

Rubinstien explains that there are four main motives for personal dress: to validate personal identity, to protect the personal self, to portray a wished-for identity and to proclaim one's personal values. I thought a lot about validating one's personal identity from a corporate standpoint. I worked at Rosenbluth International, a travel agency, right out of college. The CEO/owner, would drive to work on his motorcycle and cowboy boots. The building had about 800 employees, and about 90% of those employees dressed very casual; it was our corporate culture. Jeans were appropriate - even sneakers. After about a year of working there, Rosenbluth was bought out by a large corporation. There were many layoffs, and slowly by slowly the eight hundred employees widdled down to about fifty. As the fifty or so employees began to work for this new corporation, we (myself included) began to adopt a new corportate culture. Jeans were not worn anymore, and collared shirts and dress pants became the norm. What I found so surprising about this transition, was that nothing physically changed, but our attitudes in regard to dress, did. Nobody new from the other corporation came into our building. We were a part of new company, but our day to day activities and interactions only changed in the virtual sense. (Via the phone or email.) I believe that the adoption of this new corporate culture was resulting from the need to validate corprate self importance. Over seven hundred employees had already been let go, and the few that were left still standing, felt the need to assume new physical identities even though nothing in their job description had changed.