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People are not dressing well anymore.

I’ll include myself in that assessment.  When I first started teaching, I wore a coat and tie every day, although I’d shed the coat pretty quickly.  On Fridays, when teachers were allowed to wear jeans, I’d make myself wear a tie if I wore jeans, as a compromise (that also used to be my stage look—jeans, sports coat, tie).

Since The Age of The Virus, everything has loosened up.  I happily wear polo shirts—tucked in!—to work most everyday, aside from the six weeks of frosty winter we sometimes get in South Carolina.  Fiddling around in an un-air-conditioned football pressbox in August is far more pleasant when I’m not wearing a long-sleeve button-up with a goofy tie.

Indeed, teachers can now wear jeans, so long as they are of a darker hue, any day of the week.  My female colleagues avail themselves of this privilege fairly shamelessly.  As I descend elegantly into middle age, I’ve adopted the uniform of my people:  five-pocket workman’s slacks with a tucked-in polo or short-sleeve button-up shirt.

What has stirred my sartorial ire is not form-fitting jeans or polo shirts, but the prevalence of pajamas—yes, outright pajamas—among the general population.

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