Who is today’s white-collar man? The world of work has changed radically since The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and other mid-twentieth-century investigations of corporate life and identity. Contemporary jobs are more precarious, casual Friday has become an institution, and telecommuting blurs the divide between workplace and home. Gender expectations have changed, too, with men’s bodies increasingly exposed in the media and scrutinized in everyday interactions. In Buttoned Up, based on interviews with dozens of men in three U.S. cities with distinct local dress cultures—New York, San Francisco, and Cincinnati—Erynn Masi de Casanova asks what it means to wear the white collar now.
Despite the expansion of men’s fashion and grooming practices, the decrease in formal dress codes, and the relaxing of traditional ideas about masculinity, white-collar men feel constrained in their choices about how to embody professionalism. They strategically embrace conformity in clothing as a way of maintaining their gender and class privilege. Across categories of race, sexual orientation and occupation, men talk about "blending in" and "looking the part" as they aim to keep their jobs or pursue better ones. These white-collar workers’ accounts show that greater freedom in work dress codes can, ironically, increase men’s anxiety about getting it wrong and discourage them from experimenting with their dress and appearance.
Erynn Masi de Casanova is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Making Up the Difference: Women, Beauty, and Direct Selling in Ecuador, winner of the National Women’s Studies Association’s Sara A. Whaley Book Prize.
Table of Contents
Introduction1. Playing by the Rules: Dress Codes in Corporate WorkplacesTrading Places2. Just Like Dad? Family Relations and Class Origins in Dressing for White-Collar WorkWatches and Shoes3. Putting On the Uniform: Choice, Obligation, and Collective IdentityTailor Tales4. The Metrosexual Is Dead, Long Live the Metrosexual!Zuck's Hoodie5. What about Women? Gender and Dress at Work and HomeA Man Should Never Wear ___.6. The F Word: Men’s Engagement with FashionComfort7. Being/Becoming the Boss: Office Hierarchies and DressConclusion
What People are Saying About This
Adia Harvey Wingfield
Buttoned Up is a compelling and engaging analysis of the ways that men in white-collar professions understand the significance of clothes.
Susan B. Kaiser
I love this thought-provoking book; it is a pleasure to read. Erynn Masi de Casanova offers a nuanced and detailed exploration of a taken-for-granted and understudied topic: white-collar men's bodies. Buttoned Up attends to issues of ethnicity, sexuality, age, place, and company culture as they intersect in complex ways with masculinity and bourgeois class. It is a terrific example of qualitative social science research; Casanova's in-depth interviews support her theoretical insights.
