At CKA Mediation Blog, Chris Annunziata asks, “What Is Appropriate Law Firm Attire Nowadays?”
I would pose a far more interesting question: what might that attire be concealing?
We mediators are keepers of secrets. People trust us with sensitive information. We know their vulnerabilities, their self-doubt, their long-nursed wrongs, their secretly nurtured hopes. We have seen the hiding places of the human heart.
Yet it’s not only mediators to whom confidences are trusted. Designer and corporate lawyer David Kimelberg is the creator of Inked Inc., a photography project and book exploring the intersection of corporate and alternative culture, in which professionals roll up their sleeves and reveal the tattoos beneath the pinstripes.
An online gallery of photos of lawyers, doctors, and other professionals shows us images of these individuals in work clothes as well as of the body art they keep hidden from their colleagues. (There are, alas, no mediators, in case you were wondering.) It provides a candid look at individuals straddling the line between the professional and the personal, the corporate and the countercultural, as they proclaim their individuality in a conventional world.
Inked Inc. also provides an online social community.
So . . . inquiring minds want to know. What’ve you got up your sleeve?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmm…nothing up the sleeve but have been considering a nice little ankle tattoo…
Hmmm… never really thought about it but I can see now how it can be exciting (that may not be the word I’m looking for) to own a tattoo that noone is able to know about. You know, because of dress codes and such. It’s like it is your own personal thing and only people you let into your personal space would be able to see them… hmmm
In that way I think a tattoo is no different from the other secrets people keep, or the different faces each of us presents depending upon the world we happen to be occupying at any given moment — with colleagues, with clients, with family, or with friends.