FASHION SHOW IN THE OFFICE

BUSINESSMEN tend to be much more interested in what's new in finance than in fashion. Yet few companies remain untouched by today's uninhibited styles in dress and grooming. The swinging look, long confined to with-it secretaries, is fast spreading to other employees, men and women alike. In many offices and executive suites, business greys are giving way to the bolder hues of the boutique. For every stuffed shirt still around, for example, a freer spirit at the next desk is likely to be wearing a striped or even a paisley one. "Business is permitting far more latitude in dress than it did five years ago," says Sherrie Rubin, a field representative for Los Angeles' Western Girl Inc. employment agency.

Sprouting Sideburns. Men's turtleneck sweaters and Nehru jackets, while still the exception, are showing up in more and more offices. Engineers at Hughes Tool Co. not only wear turtlenecks but also sport luxuriant beards and mustaches. At Ealing Corp., a learning-systems and optics company in Cambridge, Mass., President Paul D. Grindle thinks nothing of going to work wearing shimmering green slacks with a red silk shirt, welcomes similar flamboyance in his employees. "The mini-er the better," he says. "People seem snappier, jazzier and zippier when dressed in mod styles."

Even the most tradition-bound companies are now loosening up on what their employees wear. Detroit's decorous J. L. Hudson Co. department store has begun allowing salesmen to wear sport coats instead of suits. Xerox insists on tonsorial tidiness, but it has permitted one of its California service technicians to affect a handlebar mustache because "it looks quite sophisticated on him." At Jersey Standard, well-cultivated sideburns are sprouting at the middle-management level. IBM, long a bastion of conservatism, has relaxed its unwritten requirement that men wear white shirts only, even though it is far from ready for the Nehru jacket.

Such liberalization often reflects the tightness and youthfulness of today's labor market. When a young woman fresh out of college takes a job, notes a secretary at Lawyers Title Insurance Corp. in Washington, she often owns nothing but miniskirts. "The men huff and puff, and the old maids grimace, but what are you going to do?" Another factor is the influx of Negro and Spanish-speaking workers, many of whom are less inhibited by convention, thus dress with more flair.

Measuring a Jellyfish. Most companies, however, continue to maintain at least some rules of dress, particularly for those employees dealing directly with the public. American Airlines has begun allowing its telephone girls to wear mufti, but still specifies clean-lined blue uniforms for those at the front desk. At most brokerage houses, securities salesmen are expected to dress conservatively. Far more freedom is given to back-office clerical workers, who are even more out of sight, both literally and figuratively, now that they are buried behind piles of paper work.

The restrictions vary widely. The only rule at San Francisco's fashionable Shreve's jewelry store is a prohibition against sleeveless dresses on saleswomen. A Houston chemical company looks askance at fishnet hose and false eyelashes. At California Federal Savings & Loan, says one official dryly, "We don't care if a man wears a beard, just so long as he doesn't wear it into the office." Geico Insurance Co.'s Washington office frowns on culotte dresses, but refrains from formally banning them because they are often difficult to detect. Many companies, in fact, shy away from hard-and-fast rules on dress, choosing instead to deal with individual cases of way-out clothing as they arise. San Francisco's Transamerica Corp. conducts grooming classes for its women employees in an effort to upgrade "taste," hopes in that way to avoid issuing rigid, morale-damaging rules.

The thorniest question for most companies is where to draw the line on miniskirts. In a survey conducted by the Administrative Management Society, 52% of the 372 firms polled had no objections to skirts two to three inches above the knee. But most frowned on the micro-miniskirt, which one executive defined as the "for-goodness'-sake-don't-bend-over style." Nowhere do miniskirts raise more eyebrows than in the Ford Foundation's new Manhattan headquarters, where secretaries work in glass-enclosed offices. Overcome by a sudden sense of modesty, one secretary, perched at a graceful but unprotective typewriter pedestal, recently sewed a minicurtain and draped it in front of her. It evidently never occurred to her to use needle and thread to lower her thigh-high hems.

Miami Mortgage Banker. Alan B. Ives, president of American Title Co., has a different solution. "I talked it over with the woman in charge of our office girls, and we agreed on miniskirts if the underpants matched." Obviously, acceptable hem length depends on the length--and shape--of a woman's legs. Determining how high miniskirts should be allowed to go, says Philip Earl, consultant for Los Angeles' Merchants & Manufacturers As sociation, "is like measuring a jellyfish with a rubber ruler."

Lunching Uptown. In most matters of dress, few companies are more conservative than those in finance and insurance. At Chicago's Northern Trust Co., a tradition requiring all officers to wear hats to work has been abandoned, but sport coats remain strictly taboo. San Francisco's Wells Fargo Bank prohibits beards, even though, admits one officer, "our founders wore them." Many secretaries employed in lower Manhattan's financial district live with their parents in Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey, thus dress with far more restraint than their emancipated counterparts working in the midtown area. "That's why," says a broker at Lehman Bros.' Wall Street area office, "I love to be invited to lunch uptown."

Young executives at Boston's Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. sometimes show up for work in sport coats, occasionally even in turtlenecks. "But if they want to become a boss," says one vice president, "they had better dress like the boss does, which means white shirt, dark suit, dark shoes and socks and a conservative tie." Similar ground rules apply in the automobile industry. "I saw someone in a yellow-and-green-plaid sport coat walking through the lobby," says a General Motors Corp. executive. "He was probably a summer replacement."

People working for communications and science-oriented companies, by contrast, usually dress with more of a flourish, especially if they hold down creative jobs. Like other women at Manhattan's freewheeling Jack Tinker ad agency, Commercial Producer Magi Durham likes to wear bell-bottomed trousers and men's sport shirts to the office. Her bearded husband Guy, associate creative director of Daniel & Charles ad agency, sometimes goes to work in blue jeans, other times in Edwardian suits and wide, polka-dot ties. Says Magi admiringly: "He swings on two lengths of the pendulum."

Predictably, there's no business quite as far out as show business. In Los Angeles, TV Producer Larry Gottlieb wears a goatee and Nehru jacket on the job, while Dot Records' offices abound with love beads and sandals. Insists Dot Promotion Man Pete Garris:

"I've been in the record business for eight years, and I've never worn a shirt and tie." Yet even the entertainment industry has its stuffier side, proving that variations in dress depend largely on what image a company is trying to project. A case in point is MCA, Inc., a film producer and recording company whose new aluminum-and-glass building in Universal City has more than its share of kookily attired production and clerical workers. Still, as one aide puts it, President Lew R. Wasserman is determined to "make the company look like a solid business operation." To that end, MCA's executives wear nothing but coal-black business suits.

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