The Day I Wore Shorts to a Job Interview

Every so often, I've found, one is compelled to do something just for the sheer hell of it, to see what will happen afterward. That was the case one sweltering July afternoon when, against all better judgment, I arrived for a job interview wearing short pants.

First, let me point out that there are shorts and there are shorts. I wasn't wearing gym shorts, swim trunks, padded Spandex bicycle tights, lederhosen, those baggy nylon things basketball players wear nowadays, or denim cut-offs. These were perfectly respectable gray wool trousers which happened to be hemmed a bit above the knee. With them I was sporting a matching wool--okay, wool/cotton blend; I said it was a hot day--sport jacket, a cotton/linen white dress shirt with a soberly pattered silk necktie, and knee-length cotton socks (which were actually kilt hose--without the little tassels--and not inexpensive, either).

Fashion experts may take a moment here to cringe. Many style gurus cite shorts-with-knee-socks as the definitive fashion no-no. Personally I don't find that such a fatal combo, as long as neither the shorts nor the socks are loudly patterned or made of synthetic materials.

But anyway, one day I decided to do my small part to liberate "shorts" from the realm of Casual Wear (Thom Browne and other contemporary designers have also done their share, although their creations often are a little too please-beat-me-up for my tastes), and give them a trial spin while on an interview for an office job I didn't much care whether I got or not anyway.

My interviewer greeted me with "You're wearing shorts." I admitted it and asked if it was a problem. He said, "Oh, no, no," and for the next half hour proceeded to tell me how it was a problem. From the waist up I was fine, he said, but below that I simply didn't look professional.

There is, admittedly, traditional justification for the interviewer's discomfort with my attire. Once upon a time, long trousers was--were?--a sign of manhood, a rite of passage ("Golly, Auntie Mame, long pants at last!"). Grown men did not wear short pants in public except on the beach, the tennis court, or certain other vacation spots.

But such superficial clothing restrictions seemed increasingly less important in modern times. By the late 1960s, fewer nuns were donning the traditional black habit, and nurses began to wear slacks. In 1974, mail carriers started wearing shorts on the job, and other delivery personnel soon followed suit. Dress codes became more flexible as economic inflation made attendance to utterly-utterly situations, which properly require that one be dressed in one's fanciest fancies, more unattainable for the common man. And, as I've mentioned before, there's no reason that shorts can't be dressy--especially in today's global-warming environment--if worn with a certain dash. How's this for a good rule for fancy occasions: the acceptable length of a man's trousers is commensurate to that of a woman's dress? (A grande dame in a floor-length gown might feel vaguely silly being escorted by a gent in Bermudas, even if--or perhaps especially if--his legs are better than hers. Grande dames, of course, have begun to grow scarce, as have floor-length gowns.)

Which brings up the gender-equality issue. I asked my interviewer whether I would be considered unprofessionally dressed if I were a woman wearing a skirt the length of my shorts. Knees are knees, after all. He didn't have an answer, just restated that he did not consider shorts proper office attire. I've since heard of many offices that draw the line on shorts, even on "casual Fridays." Jeans, of course, are perfectly all right on such occasions. ("Casual Friday," by the way, frequently is touted as a job perk, mainly because it doesn't cost management anything.) School boards are being pressured to enforce dress codes on teachers, whose increasingly casual attire is being blamed--at least in part--for the breakdown in student discipline.

Now come on. You've seen those World War II movies, set in Burma or the South Pacific, where even the officers' tropical uniforms included shorts, with no loss of respect amongst the similarly bare-legged troops. No commandant barked, "You're not leading those men into battle, Colonel, until you're dressed properly!" Conversely, Truman Capote once outraged a judge by appearing in court in shorts; very smart he looked, too (several fashion magazines wrote him up favorably).

I once read about an interviewer being so unnerved by the interviewee's tielessness that he gave the fellow $6.50 and told him to go out and buy a tie and come back to finish the interview (the fellow did, but still didn't get the job). I wondered if my interviewer likewise would offer me twenty bucks to buy some long pants; there was a shopping mall near the office building. It's just as well he didn't: I'd have taken the money and split. Like I said, I didn't much want the job anyway. But every now and then you have to stand up for a principle, don't you?