Let there be rules

STYLE

The advent of easy-to-use technology for communication has meant that we no longer know what is the best way to get in touch with someone.

In the old days, marriages, deaths and births meant a telegram. Otherwise it was just a plain old letter for keeping in touch. And unless you were Jawaharlal Nehru writing to his daughter, the language of these letters was standard and followed a pattern. There were also definite rules for telephone calls.

Now, of course, there is email, SMS, the mobile and the landline to complicate what to use, and when to be able to communicate with someone (for instance, don't even try sending someone over 50 an SMS, they won't know how to access it and if they do, then they won't know how to reply to it).

Fashion too is in the middle of such a crisis. Once upon a time an invitation to a wedding meant Indian wedding finery would come out.

Dinner or lunch invitations too had an unstated, but a code nevertheless, that everyone knew and followed. Alas, that is no longer the case. An invitation for a Sunday lunch is enough to throw the invitee into deep and unresolved confusion.

Do you wear casuals or do you dress up for the occasion? Similar confusion prevails on receiving a dinner invitation. Is this a party or a dinner? Party gear is so different from dinner-appropriate wear.

Office parties too evoke dread in most hearts these days as one can't dress like a sex bomb (lots of cleavage and skin) or a dowdy maid and the invitation rarely clarifies what one is expected to wear (and invitations that say "Dress: Western casuals" are the worst offenders).

Friday dressing, which many corporates in the West took to with great enthusiasm, followed by the corporates here, has also added to this sartorial disarray. Fridays in these kinds of offices is a blow to any fashion sensibility that one may have.

The reason for this is clear. While it was made clear what not to wear on Fridays (tie, formal trousers, formal shoes, suits), it was never fully clarified what to wear on this last working day of the week.

And this has resulted in the way people dress. Most humans can follow a line telling them what to wear in clear terms and they will do their best even if it isn't the spiffiest choice. But at least there is some cohesiveness in the way people look. Monday to Thursday, in corporate offices, people know what to wear and they do wear it.

But be even a little bit lax and leave it to individual taste and understanding and all hell breaks loose. Which is way nobody now knows what to wear when and end up making such a bloody hash of it all.

My recommendation (which needs to be followed to the T) is this, and listen up all you fashion disasters: let rules come back in the world of daily wear. Office attire must be different from party wear, which in turn must be different from clothes that one can wear for a dinner, which further should be far apart from what one would wear for an informal lunch.

This way order will be restored and the world will become if not better dressed then at least better coordinated and nobody need look like a fool or agonise over what to wear, when.

This will ease the burden that the modern man carries on his shoulder of manifold other troubles and decision making. As for communication technology, here, too, let someone set down rules. That would put an end to 11 pm SMSes from pesky PR-types like I had to endure last night. And that's a very, very happy thought.