Judith Rasband has felt for years like a voice in the wilderness. But now her voice is starting to be heard.
Within the past few weeks, she has been interviewed by broadcast and print reporters from Japan and the United Kingdom, as well as from U.S. publications like the Denver Post and The Christian Science Monitor.
But Rasband, founder and director of the Conselle Institute of Image Management in Provo, is not pontificating on some hot new business trend. In fact, what she is saying today is pretty much the same thing she has been saying for the past 20 years.
What it comes down to is this: How you look really does affect how you feel, how you act, how you think and how others respond to you. And America's push for an all-casual-all-the-time society is causing the problems she always said it would.
"We need to re-educate people to the value and influence of dress and grooming, and manners, that everybody knew in the '40s and '50s and that we lost in the '60s and '70s," Rasband says. "That's what I'm all about, is image education. . . . If we don't get to re-educate people, we're all going to end up in jeans and sweats."
She told me that last week, but she said basically the same thing four years ago when I interviewed her for a Deseret News story on the "casualization" of America. (I had never been so concerned that I dress well for an interview!) At that time, she said corporate America's move toward more casual dress probably would lead to a temporary increase in productivity and morale, but she warned that the long-term consequence would be a decrease in productivity.
Although she doesn't blame the dot-com bust on computer programmers wearing shorts and T-shirts to work, she says she does think sloppy dress can lead to sloppy thinking.
"People who are nicely dressed and groomed are better able to feel confident and capable," Rasband wrote in a recent article on her Web site, www.conselle.com. "They are seen by others as credible and better able to exercise a positive influence."
Which is not to say she thinks people should wear tuxedos and formal gowns to work every day. In fact, she has developed Conselle's Personal/Professional Style Scale, a graphic representation of the four levels of dress, ranging from tailored to untailored. The dress code is easy to understand and offers examples of what people who work in various professions should wear in various situations.
"It's not about going backwards," Rasband says. "We're not going backwards to a suit. We're going forward with more options, new options, forward with an understanding of how we dress, why we dress and what its effects will be. . . . I want (people) to have a range of clothes in their closets, for all the things they do in their lives."
Many publications have predicted that a "backlash" against casual dress is imminent, but Rasband isn't so sure, and some recent statistics back her up. According to an article in the New York Times last week, preliminary 2001 data from The Society of Human Resource Management's annual survey of attire at 754 firms "suggest that the number of firms who described employees' customary attire as 'casual all the time' actually increased by 4 percent in 2001 over the year before, to 49 percent."
Rasband says people often tell her that she needs to pick her battles. How someone dresses really is not that important to how well they work or how much they produce, they say, and she should give the whole anti-casual thing a rest.
But she feels she knows better. And so she will continue her crusade for a better-dressed America, trying to offer solutions to the "casual conundrum" in a fun, palatable way.
"It can be frustrating," she says. "But at least I can go home one day and say I tried."
E-MAIL: gkratz@desnews.com