Forty Years, No Matching Belt

Plotting World Fiber Domination in a tie at Microsoft 1998

A photo from Microsoft in 1998 - me in a tie, with a guy whose name I do not remember, 
sketching out fiber optic network technology plans at a whiteboard. This was my first time in Redmond and I wore that tie once, on my first day there, before I noticed nobody else there bothered with one. Back at the college, dress shoes were still a thing at least for me, and I never once got the belt and shoes to match. I did not even know that was a fashion rule. One would be brown, the other black….

Engineers a generation before mine wore bow ties and short sleeve shirts for a practical reason: a long tie or a loose cuff could catch in a running machine on the shop floor. That risk faded as engineering work moved from the floor to the desk, and clothing followed the same path from function to convention. By the early 1990s, tech had already dropped the tie. Engineering classrooms took another half decade or so to catch up.

The tie disappeared from teaching in the 1990s, replaced by a collared shirt and khakis. Business casual became standard by the 2000s. Remote teaching arrived next, showing only shoulders on camera. Students now attend lab in shorts and sandals, and nobody reacts.

Michael Girdley made a similar case on LinkedIn recently. He described clothing as a psychological lever and recommended sitting one notch above whatever baseline a room sets. A classroom's baseline shifted from suits to slacks to jeans across four decades. A professor one notch above jeans wears a collared shirt. Overdressing past that baseline signals distance from students.

Employers see the same pattern at senior project presentations. A team presenting to an industry panel dresses one notch above the panel's own baseline, and that baseline now runs to polos and jeans. Reading the room correctly frees energy for the work itself.

I still own that tie (and a whole bunch more) from the Microsoft photo. I wore it exactly once there. I never did learn the belt and shoes rule I was supposedly breaking. Thirty years or so in, that problem solved itself: nobody expects the tie anymore and I like my tee shirts, shorts and flip-flops.