Nothing to Wear, Nowhere to Nap?
Why American workplaces need thrifting fashion & people-sized dog beds
This newsletter helps you survive work culture in unstable institutions. Pretty serious stuff, right? Yeah, maybe, sometimes. But this week, I’m gonna chat about a couple of non-serious work trends—dressing gross and lying flat—and see what hope they offer the late-modern workplace.
Trend 01 - #grossoutfitforwork
Fellow Mode/Switcher David Wilstermann sent me a link to CNN’s reporting on a reverse glow-up for Chinese professional wardrobes. To the chagrin of employers, Douyin influencers like Kendou S have gone viral wearing sweats and dresses and quilted jackets and ski masks. It’s a tender protest: brilliantly mismatched work ‘fits.
Trend 02 - #lyingflat
A couple years back, I was skimming academic journals when I came across an analysis of a trend of tangping or “lying flat,” which proposes an intentionally slack lifestyle in response to the exhaustions of late capitalism. Turns out, the trend might trace to an April 2021 Baidu article insisting that “Lying Flat Is Justice.” You can’t find the original article (the CP took it down), but you can still find the trend going strong all over TikTok and Instagram.
Alternative Trends in American Workplaces
These are trends both funny and despairing. But American responses to professional overwhelm can be equally sad, especially when they urge the goopification of work and life. Ironically, self-care can deepen professional exhaustion by making long lists of things you better be doing: meditation, skin cleanses, long-distance running, deep reading, gratitude journals, hot yoga, and feline breathing.
Self care goes bad, as Pooja Lakshmin argues, when it substitutes for structural change. Dressing gross and lying flat are weary and resigned. But, at the very least, they exemplify social resistance to the Way Things Are.
Perhaps I like these lie-flat, dress-gross trends because my professional wardrobe seems to be falling apart at an alarming rate. What weird distractedness has conspired to stain so many of my slacks and shrink so many of my shirts at the same time? Even my soles have holes.
But you know, even if you only skim this newsletter, that I’m an uncanny optimist. Even in the stuckness of corporate culture, I insist on on small but mighty moves you can make to resist the ideology of workism. Following the organizational communication scholar Stacey Weiland, who locates meaningful change at the intersection of mindset and habit, I’m looking for ways to change your mind and change your habit in the midst of work culture.
So, what practices do these two trends offer our organizational lives?
This week’s recommendations for work culture
We should normalize thrifting for professional clothes. Note that I’m not saying we should just buy cheaper versions of our usual costumes. Instead, follow the bold practices of thrifters and transform how you usually dress. Take, for instance, the Pinterest-y fashion of sandwich dressing. (Don’t bother Googling it, unless you want hoagie toppings.) Sandwich-dressing means tucking the “bologna” of unexpected items between the “bread slices” of conventional items, something like this sock sandwich:
Oh, right. That’s why I allow my shoes to develop holes: that way people can see my cool socks when I cross my legs. Sigh.
Sometimes I think that clothes wear out so fast, it would be better if workplaces mandated durable garb like surgical scrubs or vintage 1950s work uniforms—which everybody could then spruce up with a wild t-shirt of their choosing. But enforcing that sort of mandate does sound just a wee bit PRC.
So, how about if we all agree to casually thrift-drop in everyday conversation? “So, after we hit the consignment shops last Sunday, my partner and I…”
We should normalize human-sized dog beds in our offices. You know, if you follow the Mode/Switch Pod that I regularly nap under my desk George Costanza style. But if a client walks in while you’re stretched out on the floor, it can be hard to come back from the encounter. Sleeping on the floor isn’t particularly sanitary, either.
But am I the crazy human here, or would stashing something like this in the corner of your office go a long way toward healing the planet?
Leaning in, lying flat, lifting up
Okay, my recommendations aren’t particularly serious this week. But I do see three modes at play in our workplaces.
Doing what’s good for the self often translates into something like the eminently critiquable leaning in with its advice to girl-boss your way to equity at work.
But Gen Z quiet quitting and lying flat make it clear that power poses haven’t fundamentally changed the workplace.
Still, I see a sliver of hope in a third mode, which we might call lifting up, or taking steps to counter the culture for the good of others.
Leaning in can be individualizing. Lying flat can be paralyzing. But they both have the virtue of compelling us to think about our own vocational postures. They make us realize that workplace taken-for-granteds don’t have to be taken for granted. They give us, in other words, a chance to look for ways of lifting up. Buying gently used clothes and taking ten-minute naps might just be a way to raise awareness for the “soft animal of your body.” (Thank you Mary O.)
I doubt that thrifting and napping will make anybody’s lists for great moments in labor negotiations or civil rights history. (Mode/Switcher Andrea Munday notes that Black-led Nap Ministry might suggest otherwise.) But think of the small resistances of everyday work and life as ways to acknowledge and honor the ordinary fragility of human working life.
