Vaccinations for COVID-19 have begun, promising that in a matter of months, the pandemic will be over. It’s not too early, then, to start thinking about how life will have been changed by a panicky year of plague and to ask what the new normal will be.
Will, for example, the elbow bump permanently replace the handshake? Not a chance. Soon, the elbow bump will be nothing but an unpleasant reminder of hard times, an embarrassing vestige of nervous Nellie-ism. The handshake won’t just fill its old social role by default. It will be embraced as a declaration of victory.
A more challenging question: What will be the new normal in how we dress? The assumption has been that after the better part of a year wearing nothing but the most casual of clothes, no one will want to go back to the stuffy jacket-and-tie nonsense. But I wonder. Could it be that the reaction to a year of lockdowns and quarantines will instead be a new formality?
I have a fall and spring ritual. Let’s call it “the Changing of the Suits.” Come September, I shuttle my seersuckers, poplins, and linens from the second-story closet near the bedroom down to the basement closet where the flannels and tweeds spend the summer. Then, it’s back upstairs, woolen suits in hand. Down and up, down and up. I repeat this until all the summer suits are out of the way for the winter and the winter suits are readily at hand. The same routine happens in reverse around Memorial Day.
But this year, my ritual went by the wayside. September came and went, and there was no Changing of the Suits. October, too. Even November. Under normal circumstances, this would be where I would be obliged to bemoan global warming and argue that the presence of cotton suits in my closet in November is proof the world is getting hotter and the climate apocalypse is upon us. But as much as such piffle would do to put me in good odor with my fellow Washington scribblers, it isn’t true.
The disruption of my wardrobe ritual has nothing to do with temperatures — well, other than the sort that gets taken off our foreheads before we are allowed in an office or on an airplane. That is, it is yet another of the side effects of COVID-19.
I didn’t think to move my suits because I simply haven’t been wearing suits.
For some time, I have wondered how long we will labor under the tyranny of perpetual vacation clothes. At first, the hoodie and jeans look was a statement of power. You had to be a Big Tech Croesus to do high finance while dressed like a bum. But then, everyone adopted as much of the look as they could get away with. Dressing in a suit and tie long ago stopped signaling wealth and power and came to suggest, instead, that one worked the counter at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
Could the coronavirus have finally changed that dynamic? Having worked from home since March, I now associate casual clothes with being in the endless COVID-19 lockdown. Casual clothes had been a symbol of liberation. Now, they are the orange jumpsuits of our quarantine lockup.
I suspect I am not the only one who looks at the forlorn, unworn suits in my closet with anticipation. I am eager to knot a tie, to stay clean-shaven, to put a shine on my shoes. Enough with being a schlub. That’s for those who get bossed around by the power-mad middle managers of local government.
A new professionalism in dress, a new formality, may well be a refreshing rejection of the ragamuffin uniform that was suited for working alone in an unfinished basement.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?