We seriously can’t make sense of this. They’re asked to dress in business casual attire, but never really made specifics. It’s assumed that the general “no jeans, nice shirt, etc.” is considered.
My husband worked as a professor at a big university before this, but has recently been hired as full time staff at the same university. I won’t say what his title is now specifically, but his office in particular has about 6-8 other women working with him. Students do not enter this space.
He gets complimented for dressing so well from at least one person everyday on campus. He’s usually known in our friends group as being the best dressed one.
My husband either does a tie and vest or a suit jacket and dress shirt. When he does the dress shirt and no tie, he’ll leave the top two buttons unbuttoned. You barely can see his neck, let alone chest or chest hair. And he wears nice dress pants and will have socks with dress shoes or he’ll be sockless and wear $200 penny loafers (don’t worry, he got them on super sale .) His ankles show, but it’s still done tastefully.
Anyways his boss asked to see him in her office and made the following comments,
“You show too much skin and it’s making myself and the rest of the office uncomfortable…”
“I’m telling this to you out of respect because I don’t want you to be embarrassed by your fellow colleagues…”
“You know when someone has something in their teeth and no one tells them? Well, that’s what I’m trying to do when I’m telling you show too much skin.”
“I want your coworkers to respect you.”
“What you’re wearing today looks good.” (Keep in mind what he wore yesterday was literally the same arrangement of clothing he wears all the time!)
We are both so confused. What are everyone else’s thoughts on this? How do you think we should move forward? I want to tell him to just let it be, but I feel as though he’s being bullied for some reason. And he feels extremely uncomfortable now. If this happened to a woman it would be a total shitshow, but because he’s a man I feel like he’s almost SOL. Any advice would be appreciated!
(Image of what he wore that day in comments.)