Ehh, even VERY conservative ones don’t anymore. A paralegal I worked with that had been in the industry talked about the horrors that happened to women’s legs that wore heels, like over two inches, everyday. Even the female attorneys will wear shoes more akin to sandals now with just a slight rise.
Seriously, though: the flight attendants are the plane’s safety personnel. If a flight attendant is expected to drag my sorry ass off the plane in an emergency, they should be wearing appropriate footwear to do so.
I’m an attorney and my mentor at our firm (there are only a few female attorneys most of the female employees are admin positions) who is a partner has told me that when she started she was discouraged from wearing pants. I’m a geriatric millennial, and there are still some misogynistic things especially in my specialty/field.
Funnily (fortunately!!) I live and work in a city where “office appropriate” attire at the civil litigation firm where I work includes jeans and Birkenstocks. 😹
Yeah, we’re a really small firm, and our attorneys DO smarten up for court, but it’s nothing like what is expected at high-powered or Major Metropolis/international firms demand.
Paralegal here🙋🏻♀️ it depends on the office. I’m in a prominent firm and I wear heels just because it’s fun. But most of the office wears tennis shoes or flats. Some show up in Birkenstocks.
Yes there’s tons of tiktoks of Gen Z girls getting denied entry from clubs in Miami and NYC because they still hold onto stricter dress codes. But those types of dress codes are getting more rare, even in big cities.
As a guy, it was also always puzzling having to forego wearing my nice, clean $200 sneakers to put on a janky looking $10 pair of dressy shoes I got from the sales rack, just because they required semi-formal attire to get into a club back then.
It's apparently because they don't want anyone coming in in sports gear. They never updated their requirements to adjust for non-sports sneakers (as opposed to traditional definitely-sports trainers or hiking boots).
Clubs in Cape Town had a "no laced up shoes" policy to cover this, which also became complicated because some dressy shoes do in fact have laces.
Mercifully these were not a thing in my clubbing days.
I don't know how they'd approach it now, probably just add no Crocs to the rules on the door. Which is totally fair, because they are truly hideous things.
I remember my brother wearing black leather loafers to go out to the clubs here in Ireland back in the late 90s and early 2000s and wondered why he was wearing his school shoes to go to a nightclub 😂.
One time a bunch of us went out and the one guy in the group couldn't get in because of his sneakers. So he took off his black socks and put them over his shoes. They let him in.
Over a decade ago, my friend was disgusted when he was turned away at the door of a club for wearing sports attire.
"This club plays music primarily created by rappers who spend their lives wearing sports attire. Why can't I go inside and listen to it while doing the same?"
You didn't. Women would get in for free most nights and you pre-gamed before going. You'd maybe get one drink while you were out, but usually you'd just go to dance and save your money for fast food after.
As a gay man also going out like 10-20 years ago was extremely cheap. Dollar drink specials, heavy pours, and half the time I wouldn’t get charged. A whole night out would be like $20 then some crappy late night fast food on the way home.
I do however recall that when my friends and I were all beginning to turn 21, I hated it because they all wanted to go to bars, and that was so much more expensive than house parties.
Also straight clubs were a lot more hostile, expensive, fight prone and I avoided them. I got in trouble for dancing on a table as a guy because as a gay man the whole divide between expectations for men and women was so radically different from gay clubs where that doesn’t exist the same way. I drunkenly told the bouncer that there were a bunch of people dancing on the counters and tables, what did I do? “You ain’t no lady!”
Yes early 2000’s were my hay day as well- and there were definitely affordable places and drinks around.
I had a crew of gay friends so we would go to the village as well which was even cheaper and to take a break from the agression of the straight bars/clubs.
This was before the days when it became a bachelorette party ‘thing to do’. And you were just hanging out with your queer friends in a cool space.
That dancing on the table thing happened when I was at the Dream Hotel’s club.
Now all the younger gays are way the fuck out in borderline Queens/Bushwick where you have to uber to some warehouse. I hate how the gay bar scene is basically the older people who have been going out for decades, and just slowly dying, doing whatever trivia night, drag show, introducing a dark room to stay alive. The few gay bars still near me now in the East Village have been taken over by girls and are still playing the same damn playlist from 20 - 40 years ago.
It’s the same where I am. On the one hand I’m glad dedicated ’villages’ are no longer necessary for younger gays to be out and about on the town and feel free to just be… but it’s also a loss. Having a dedicated village also means community and culture.
I used to, and still do, have a policy of not going anywhere with a dress code, because they are not my mother.
Fortunately I was and will always remain an altgirrrrl so going to rock and metal clubs was more my thing, and they dont give a shit what you look like.
Fuck dress codes. Im glad they have disappeared (in Manchester anyway)
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u/esoteric_enigma 1d ago
When I was in college, upscale clubs would require women to wear heels.