![]() ![]() “I was the CEO, and I am a small female,” said Jenny Silva, who ran a sheet-music company in California. ![]() Some did their hair and makeup more thoroughly on legging days to compensate. Perhaps this is why people said office leggings should be conservative-opaque and dark. One 22-year-old, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her job, said her boss once said leggings made her look “young.” Another woman was told she looked “cozy.” Women feared that leggings would make them look unprofessional or too sexy. ![]() The 50-some responses spoke to how much thought women put into how they’re perceived at work, and how even the elasticity of one’s pants can be seen as a career obstacle. I conducted my own small survey too, sending out a Google form through social media that asked for women’s experiences wearing leggings to work. In an informal internet poll performed by the Society for Human Resource Management this year, 90 percent of the 9,000 respondents said leggings violate their office dress code. (One common leggings workaround is wearing a long sweater or shirt to mask the butt.) Graham herself admitted that she rarely wears leggings out of the house. After a mother wrote a letter to the editor of the student newspaper at Notre Dame, pleading with leggings-wearers to “think of the mothers of sons the next time you go shopping and consider choosing jeans instead,” Slate’s Ruth Graham explained how leggings have long been controversial in several faith communities. The other place where leggings are deemed unacceptable today: church. The ’70s brought complaints about women wearing sheer blouses, and back in the ’30s there was consternation over sleeveless tops. Before leggings, says Linda Przybyszewski, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame, there were controversies over cleavage and midriffs. It’s long been thought that women shouldn’t look too sexy in the workplace, and leggings. Work is one of the most sartorially conservative places for women. Once they started showing up in offices, however, the outcry began. By the 2000s, they’d taken off in tandem with yoga. Leggings made headway in the aerobics-crazed 1980s, when synthetic-fiber technology became more sophisticated. The concept came from the dance world (think ballerina outfits), and by the 1950s, cool girls at Barnard were hanging out downtown in black tights and oversized men’s sweaters, says Deirdre Clemente, a historian at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas who focuses on American fashion in the 20th century. Leggings sauntered into our lives in the second half of the 20th century. My office dress code says nothing on the subject, so I decided to ask around. I mean nothing but a thin layer of spandex between your butt and the conference-room chair, supporting you as you talk about synergies. I mean leggings, the kind you wear to yoga or to the couch when you’re hungover. The waist band digs in, the legs ride up, and, depending on how long in the pelvis you are, the crotch gets more intimate with you than is common on Tuesday afternoons.Īll of this led me to wonder: Is it okay for me, or any woman, to wear these puppies to the office regularly, or what? I don’t mean the leggings that are made to look like dress pants-though that’s basically all women’s dress pants these days, and we’ll get to those later. Sitting for that long is not comfortable in regular pants. Working in leggings is approximately 400 times more comfortable than working in literally any other garment. But I would argue that tights are better than pants. That’s not an uncommon view in America’s cubicle farms. In fact, when I told my colleagues I was working on this article, several of them came to my desk, in their traditional slacks, and registered their complaints. Occasionally, some mayor or other VIP stops by. Most everyone at my office is nicely dressed, from the occasional TV-ready suit-wearer to our fashion-conscious female editors. Leisurely, but athletic: This is how Clarendonians live. ![]() Their barre-weary haunches have been compressed by elite performance mesh. Whenever I see adult humans out and about, they are wearing leggings. Normally, I only wear leggings in the culturally appropriate setting of Clarendon, the Washington, D.C., suburb where I live. My computer seemed to run more quickly my sources were more responsive the PR people were less angry. With nothing but a stretchy band and Nulu(™) fabric holding me in, I felt freer, like I was dancing through my duties, rather than trudging through them encased in polyester and wool. I don’t remember what specific combo of frustration and busyness led me to wear leggings to the office one day recently, but I do remember it felt magical. ![]()
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