Brave new restaurant dress code full#
Brave new restaurant dress code code#

Priscilla Von Sorella, a fashion designer in Manhattan, said that dressing nicely allows her to express unspoken gratitude for restaurants. Many embrace the opportunity to spruce up. “But it cues people, like, ‘Hey, I am going to go home and get a little dolled up.’”

Brave new restaurant dress code code#

“It is not stuffy,” Kim Walker said of the dress code at her Los Angeles rooftop lounge, Bar Lis. Some allow more informal clothing like jeans, cropped shirts and miniskirts. Many restaurateurs point out that their dress policies are broadly worded so they won’t be perceived as racially coded or gender-specific. (The restaurant group apologized and relaxed the code.) In the summer of 2020, the Baltimore City Council passed a resolution that called on the Atlas Restaurant Group to eliminate its dress code after a Black woman and her son, who was in athletic wear, were denied entry to Ouzo Bay, while a white child dressed similarly was already dining. Some local governments have even stepped in to condemn dress codes. “Dress signifies a lot of highly contested issues: gender identity and gender roles, race, class, status,” said Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School and the author of “ Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History.” “When we can’t really talk about these issues openly, we struggle through proxies, like clothing.” Lance Bottoms, and it had updated the dress code and retrained staff on proper enforcement.)

Last month, the former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tweeted that she had been turned away from a Capital Grille in that city for wearing leggings, and wondered “if the woman who came in immediately after me, who I did not see come back out, was also denied service.” (The restaurant group said Monday that the woman had come in for takeout, but that its president apologized to Ms. In the last few years, the restaurant business has grappled with issues of equity and inclusion, and dress codes have come under fresh criticism as a covert means of discriminating or treating customers arbitrarily. Eric Ripert, the chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, in Manhattan, said he dropped a requirement that men wear jackets because sharing the restaurant’s loaner coats seemed unhygienic. Anything else? “Absolutely no flip-flops,” the chef and owner, Angie Mar, emphasized in an interview.ĭress codes may also seem counterintuitive at a time when many diners have reacted angrily to other directives - like requests to wear a face mask - and when even some formal restaurants with longstanding dress rules have loosened them during the pandemic. For those without a jacket, a vintage Yves Saint Laurent model would be provided.

Lest there be any confusion, details followed: “Blue jeans, shorts and sneakers are strictly prohibited.” Diners were “kindly” requested to wear jackets. “We expect our guests to arrive in proper dinner attire, and for you to celebrate the style that downtown New York City can bring.” “At Les Trois Chevaux, we revere the style and finesse that can only be attributed to having New York swagger,” it said. They had been instructed to do so the previous day in a text message that read like a manifesto.

Brave new restaurant dress code full#

That everyone was in full feather at this restaurant, Les Trois Chevaux, was no coincidence. When a fashionably dressed couple stopped in momentarily for a peek at the menu, the sight was jarring: They were wearing jeans. Pearls gleamed, freshly buffed shoes glowed. A couple in a velvet corner booth wore suits - his navy, hers powder blue. One unusually warm evening in the West Village, while other New Yorkers were outside walking their dogs in sneakers and T-shirts, a family of five sat primly in the front window of a formal dining room, each of them garbed in a stylish blazer.