Parliament's Speaker struck a valuable blow for dress codes everywhere when he told an MP this week she could not wear a rugby jersey in the House.
Dunedin MP Clare Curran was wearing the Highlanders' old colours in protest at the team's new green hue, and Speaker Lockwood Smith let her make her dress statement while she questioned a minister (about matters more important). But when the questions were done, he told her to go and change.
There is probably no safe way for a man to say that to a woman. Dr Smith tried to explain that if a male came into the chamber wearing a rugby top he would be reminded the dress code is "normal business attire". The phrase piqued the Greens' Sue Kedgley, who pretended not to know what it meant.
The subject of clothing is oddly mystifying to intelligent, liberal-minded people, even when they dress as well as Ms Kedgley does.
They always pretend that dress is of no importance to them and should be of no interest to anybody else. To maintain this pretence, they are obliged to close their minds to one of the plain facts of human life.
The way a person dresses expresses a great deal about their attitude to themselves and to others. Especially their attitude to others. Nobody, unless they are going to spend time in seclusion, dresses entirely for themselves.
They dress for the sort of place they are going, the work they will be doing, their regard for what they do and appearance they wish to present.
Appearances may not be the most important indicator of an individual's attitudes to himself, his work, his colleagues and clients, but they are important.
The person who decides to break an occupational dress code is telling colleagues he or she does not hold their collective efforts in as high a regard as they do. That may not always be the intended message but the code-breaker ought to be aware it may be taken.
Clare Curran undoubtedly intended no disrespect to the position she holds and others who hold it. She was having some fun, and it was not the first time a woman MP had worn a sports team's colours in the chamber.
That may have been the reason the Speaker decided it was time to stop it. Dress codes are delicate; they are hard to define, hardly ever spoken aloud and it can take just a few breaches before nobody can be sure whether they apply any more.
A survey of Australia in the Economist last week observed in passing that dress standards there were very low. The same would be said of this country from a European perspective. It is not that we dress casually but that we dress casually badly. Take off a tie and we are instantly sloven.
The business community has been discarding ties lately, though keeping suits for respectability. In the private sectors of professions such as law and medicine, practitioners seem to find a high dress standard rewarding.
In public hospitals and schools standards of dress have declined in recent decades, though school pupils' standards have recently risen.
Politics operates somewhere in between. Its practitioners live in suits and ties, or the female equivalents, for almost all public engagements until, curiously, they come to an election campaign. Then ties are torn off at every turn lest voters suspect candidates have a surfeit of self-esteem.
But in Parliament dress standards survive, as they did under the previous government.
Helen Clark set standards in this respect that deserved more recognition than they received. We do not talk about clothing as seriously as we should. Dress says a great deal about the man, and the woman. Look closely at those who deny it; their attire will tell another story.
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