‘Dress-up Fridays’ – Entry for June 21, 2006
Leaving has made me more reminiscent that I normally would be.
Brett and I were talking about personal fashion preferences last night, particularly related to my shopping habit of quickly scanning a store for a plaid or a fall palette (green, brown, etc.) shirt and quickly leaving if there are none. That short conversation led us to reminisce a little about our days at Geo, about the people there, and a peculiar custom I had.
We started talking about a coworker at GeoCities who was known for wearing a French Blue dress shirt and the reactions he received (strange tangent, eh?). It wasn’t that he wore a loud shirt every few days; rather he seemed to wear the same shirt every day of the week. A lot of coworkers found it odd and some were bothered by what they considered his lack of fashion sense and [my theory] their inability to judge his cleanliness. We still find their reaction humorous. At the time, I just chalked it up to it being his favorite shirt and I didn’t spend energy worrying about his mental health or hygiene (he didn’t reek). In reality, he had multiple copies of the same shirt that he regularly laundered. He told Brett that he wanted to be remembered and that wearing French Blue helped people remember him.
With that memory out of the way, Brett mentioned my subversive ‘dress-up Fridays.’ That’s right, ‘dress-up Fridays.’ For at least a year, if not two, I would dress up on Fridays. More formal companies had ‘casual Fridays’ so I decided our ubercasual company should celebrate the opposite. So on Fridays, I wore khaki slacks, suede oxfords, and a button-up shirt. Some Fridays, I’d even add a tie. â??Dress-upâ?? is a relative term. Like much of the company at the time, I wore t-shirts with jeans or shorts most days. I didnâ??t own a suit until 2001. Sadly, I wasn’t very successful. I would sometimes have others join me in my pursuit of an upside-down world, but that didn’t happen much outside coincidental success.
