From my monthly col­umn in form magazine.

You are what you wear.

Recently in Frank­furt, a pub­lic debate on the occa­sion of the Ger­man Design Council’s 50^th anniver­sary: the place is fes­tive and peo­ple are dressed accord­ingly. It is easy to dis­tin­guish between those active in the design pro­fes­sion and those who com­mis­sion design, com­ment on it or run the busi­ness part of it. The real or the intended prox­im­ity to the pro­fes­sion seems obvi­ous, sim­ply judged by the absence of dec­o­ra­tion around men’s necks. Real design­ers don’t wear ties. What does that tell us? On the one hand, that it is both eas­ier and more dif­fi­cult for women. They need to do more than just leave their neck­ties at home in order to sig­nify a cre­ative back­ground. On the other hand, it means that Paul Klee was spot on in say­ing “Only appear­ances are not false”. You are what you are seen to be. This makes it easy for clients to write us off as artis­tic weirdos, when more often than not we are just too lazy to shave every day. Isn’t it amaz­ing that such an unspec­tac­u­lar act of refusal is enough to qual­ify a whole pro­fes­sion? But maybe there has been some progress. Graphic design­ers don’t have to wear one black and one white shoe to stand out from the crowd any­more, and cer­tain prod­uct design­ers can give up wear­ing a heavy white sweater in all weath­ers, just to be instantly rec­og­nized as a designer.

On the other hand, vol­un­tary uni­forms can turn out to be very prac­ti­cal indeed, on both sides. If your client wears a striped tie with a navy blazer, you can take this as an obvi­ous hint for the choice of type­face: pre­cise ser­ifs and well-behaved cen­tred set­ting. Archi­tects in tight tur­tle necks à la Ulm will most cer­tainly only let Rotis touch their papers. Oxford shirts with button-down col­lars spell Anglo-american pref­er­ences, for David Ogilvy per­haps. A period after every word helps here. Like. So. Bul­bous div­ing watches and fat foun­tain pens are stan­dard kit for alumni from Cal­i­forn­ian design schools. The image of the del­i­cate, reality-shy cre­ative is often sig­ni­fied by a lit­tle goa­tee which threat­ens to be blown away by the slight­est breeze. Only, how­ever, if our pale col­league exposed him­self to the out­side, whence his cool, air-filled sneak­ers would speed him up enough to arrive early for his next appoint­ment. And that would be dis­as­trous. Being caught in obser­vance of an old-fashioned virtue like punc­tu­al­ity could almost be detri­men­tal to a designer’s reputation.