By “official fashion” I mean the “dress for success” look that you supposedly need to get a good job, run for public office, look “serious” and “conservative,” etc. Official fashion doesn’t change very rapidly, but change it does. The other thing about it is that a certain amount of coercion is involved with it. Which prompts this thread topic.
Let’s go back in time to, say, 1888. Men wore full beards to the office. Women wore long dresses, long uncut hair, and no makeup to the office. This was the sober, conservative look required of businesspeople in that day.
Jump ahead to the 1950s-1970s. Everything described above is now topsy turvy. Men cannot wear beards on pain of being fired. Women are (according to the Women Dress for Success book) discouraged from wearing long hair and long dresses. They are practically forced to wear makeup; some are fired from their jobs for refusing to.
It weirds me out how long skirts were (until recently) considered inappropriate for women to wear to a corporate job. Women who wore them were looked on as dangerous hippie radicals. Probably didn’t even shave their legs! The horror! No, to be appropriately “conservative,” you have to expose your legs. The makeup issue weirds me out even more! In great-grandmother’s day, only a “fallen woman” would dare appear in public with a “painted” face. Next thing you know, you fall from (corporate) grace if you don’t paint your face.
All this arbitrariness, combined with coercion, seems to me deeply weird.