Working from home makes you have another freedom that few people realize: the freedom of tyranny of clothing.
I was looking for a time when more people had the option of not having to move to an office for a constant number of hours every day of the week.
Many have dreamed of such a world, but have questioned its practical viability. This year, Covid-19 forced him to become a reality. In Singapore, where I live, academics and their teachers have had to temporarily adapt to home learning. His parents, who were now asked to paint from home, suddenly experienced the freedom of sad inflexible routines.
This is not to say that running away from home is liberating and productive for everyone. Without design and routine, you can lose control, be hit and not know where to start. Without the closeness of colleagues, one would possibly feel socially distant and could not collaborate significantly despite the online communication team. Being surrounded at home by other family members all the time, each fighting over limited space, amenities and privacy to do their own job, can be stressful.
But running away from home makes you have another freedom that few people realize: the freedom of tyranny in clothes.
First, we don’t want a variety of clothes anymore. We don’t have to think too much about what to wear in the morning or look frantically for that matching piece that might be in the wash. We can focus exclusively on dressing the most sensitive part of our body, giving a new meaning when dressing “up”. Video conferencing teams like Zoom, Skype, and Webex free us from those requests. And there may even be days when we don’t want anyone to notice us.
Secondly, we no longer want to wear expensive clothes. Thanks to the video, it’s hard to know how good someone’s clothes look or how inspired they are with their fashion brands. Working from home has a remarkably equal effect. And you can store a lot of cash by simply buying less expensive garments that can only be dry cleaned.
Thirdly, we no longer want to wear casual, formal and unshing clothing. Technically, we can wear a set of garments every day, saving time and money in the washing. A diversity of flexible casual and sports clothing has emerged, providing quite expensive, cornea and comfortable clothing that can be worn at work, exercise, daily tasks, rest and even sleep, without having to change.
Working from home with comfortable garments also gives other people like me, who live in the tropics, the freedom of extreme climates. While the exterior is warm and humid all year round, enter any construction of the workplace and observe virtually arctic temperatures. It’s ironic to see in a different way relaxed tropical citizens dressed in layers of warm clothes, tyrannized through central air conditioning.
My wife, a school principal, tells me I’ve become a bum. Maybe she’s right. As a former college dean of a public policy elementary school, he used well-cut cuts for paintings because, almost every day, there were formal meetings with formal people.
These days, I wear blouse and shorts at any time of the day, repeating the same garments for a few days. When there is an assembly to attend or a webinar to offer in Zoom, I wear a blouse or jacket only during the hours.
On the other hand, my wife still receives dressed “office hours” on race days at home, believing that there deserves to be a sense of opportunity and decorum with respect to social and official contexts. Some, like her, still dress in paint in order to delimit a boundary between “virtual office” and “home”, so that the painting does not penetrate all walks of life, adding up those that deserve to be reserved for rest, recreation. and yourself. Concern. Others appreciate the freedom to express their individual personality, creativity and identity through their clothing, even if only virtually.
So how is it that the freedom of tyranny of clothing is compatible with those other freedoms for themselves and assigns themselves to the virtual corporation of others?
Perhaps we deserve to expand a larger generation to produce virtual clothing, a fashion dedraperiization that improves diversity and the capacity for tradition, while reducing curtain waste and unnecessary expense. Imagine, if we could fashion using Zoom’s virtual cloakroom before a video conference. And believe it if we could also buy more traditional virtual fashion pieces to expand our wardrobe at a low price. Communications generation platforms already provide virtual funds. It’s time for them to think about helping us get drunk, too.
Kenneth Paul Tan is a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.
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