Submarines And Suits

Whilst getting ready for work on Thursday morning, there was an atricle on the morning news show Sunrise about dress suits being back in fashion for work clothes. At the time, I passed it off as just another morning news article and attributed the content of the article to changing fashions this year.

They had a fellow on there saying that “casual Friday’s” are on the down turn and that the “casual” nature of the clothing reflects in staff performance. He also went on to say that, paraphrasing here, “you don’t want people coming to work in thongs and a singlet”. Now, you would assume that he is referring to the typical plugger thongs and a jacki how singlet from yester-year. The reality is though, that on the Gold Coast, the majority of females do in fact wear strapped shoes of some sort, a denim skirt and a singlet of some form. Does he infer that they shoudln’t be allowed to come to work in that attire, when that is what they are happy to be seen wearing in public, knowing full well females are always critical of what they wear?

Back to the submarines.

Tonight, I thought I would check back to some of my ‘not as frequently visited sites’. One such site was Paul Graham’s, of which I make a point of reading his excellent essays. Pauls latest essay entitled The Submarine is, in short about the role that Public Relations companies play in main stream news.

Once you read through the essay, which is dated this month, you’ll notice that he also talks about the phrase “The Suit is Back”. Given that, we are in the same month and Sunrise even had an “expert” in toe, you have to wonder whether or not this is in fact the work of the wonderful PR machines. The one thing that I don’t recall hearing in the article, was the name of any particular company that they were pitching for; in Pauls case that was The Men’s Wearhouse.

I thought Paul made some great comments about picking up PR in the news, this one in particular:

Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he’s writing about this subject at all.

The mind begins to wonder.