Dress codes are designed to tell you that you are not one of a kind, and don’t you get uppity. A dress code is how you are kept in your place

One wonders if a chairman would command less respect if he showed up to work wearing mid-thigh boxer shorts with a business shirt and double-breasted coat. PIC/Illustration by C Y Gopinath using AI

You may have heard of the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen and his jeans. On December 28 at the Rapid World Chess Championship, he was fined $200 by the International Chess Federation for wearing them even though it went against the tournament’s dress code. Carlsen, 34 now, became the world’s top chess player at age 13 and has retained the Grandmaster title five times since then.

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But he wasn’t having any jeans nonsense. He’d been out at a lunch meeting and had barely had time to change his shirt and jacket. When his jeans became an issue, he doubled down and just walked out of the tournament rather than change out of them.

“I’m too old at this point to care too much,” he said at an interview with Take Take Take, a chess magazine.” I’ll probably head off to somewhere where the weather is a bit nicer than here.”

All this pother over clothes got me wondering why a chess tournament even needs a dress code. After all, the........

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