The IT Crowd
I was recently reading an article in Marie Claire UK (yes I do read non-nerdy publications, some higher AI should sentence my brain to enter a loop without an exit condition) which explained that women should start learning how to code in order to become successful professionally. That triggered my curiosity and I started to wonder when IT became classy enough to be mentioned in a fashion magazine. This might be the time for a little history.
Don’t blame Information Technology.
Once upon a time, well before the internet – yes kids, there was a time where people had to read books to access knowledge – IBM was ruling them all. It was such an important and powerful company that you could likely compare it to Google today. IBM salesmen were to wear suits, ties and an attaché case every day like other any other corporate person and techies had to wear a simple white shirt with an IBM logo on it. IT fashion at that time was pretty much neutral and IT was seen as any other field of work.
In the early eighties, Bill Gates who started to do business with IBM had a look that would, for some reason, stick with IT people for decades: oversized glasses, poorly shaped and tasteless beige tops with a pair of equally bad looking trousers.
Steve Jobs on the other hand when not representing his company officially was already seen wearing his now infamous denim and black turtleneck combo. The power of branding.
How come then that with so many different styles in circulation, one prevailed in people’s minds as the standard geek outfit? Well, in order to understand, we have to broaden our search a bit and we can then realize one thing: in the eighties, almost every person that had an interest in science had poor social skills and or almost no interest in fashion or styling. While this is a gross generalization a quick internet search for images of “nerd 80s style” should demonstrate what I mean.
Music has changed it all.
In 2001 Mp3 players had existed for years but were a niche market as their price was too high, their storage capacity too low (one album would fill up a player) and they required a computer and some technical knowledge. Downloading a song was also an obstacle as there was no massively spread peer to peer or legal solutions at that time.
Then came Apple with its iPod, almost like a piece of art that created curiosity and attraction and offered enough storage space for many albums at once. I think this was the first time the public saw an interest in a computer or mac related device. CDs while hugely popular were impractical – think of carrying more than one of them with you everywhere you go – huge and mostly unreliable for jogging or walking fast.
People who wanted an mp3 player and who did not own a computer had to get one and access to the internet. The internet which was mostly used by “people who knew” became more and more popular and people started to massively use emails and chats (msn, aim and all those brands which do not exist any longer) and slowly gained the knowledge to use internet in a more efficient way. This led internet providers to offer higher bandwidth and the development of a plethora of websites with ever more content.
With access to everything at all times, computers gained in popularity and the emergence of smartphones spread the use of internet even a bit further.
In the mid-2000s, technology, the people traditionally associated with it and their culture then became hip. That was the beginning of the “geek chic” trend, often confused nowadays with the hipster subculture. People started to wear old style clothes such as suspenders and those oversized horn-rimmed glasses. Not adapted to the business world, this trend quickly faded however with the public gaining awareness of things beyond glasses, thanks to popular TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory or Chuck, the geek culture spread widely.
Finally recommendable
All those factors contributed to IT becoming less and less a world of “freaks and geeks” and more and more a profession as acceptable and as open to everyone as any other, finally showing up as a recommendation for a professional path in a women’s magazine.
It was about time.
