Sajeda Momin
London: The BBC’s youth channel is planning to take dress-down Friday to its logical conclusion: no-dress day. BBC Three is coming up with a reality show where people will be asked to report to work naked. The purpose, it says, is to look at people’s attitudes to nudity, body image and the role clothes play in office hierarchy.
The first few episodes of the series, called Naked Office,will have cameras following fully clothed employees at work to gauge their views on nudity. Some will be asked to pose in the buff for life-drawing classes and it will be seen how comfortable they are about being naked in public.
In the next set of episodes, the channel will ask its employees to participate in a no-clothes event called Naked Friday.
Cambridge University professor Chris Smith,who created BBC Radio’s popular programme The Naked Scientists, told DNA: “The amount you spend on clothes shows how well you have done or are doing [in career] and where you stand in the office hierarchy. If you look at Britain of the 1950s, you will see an entrenched hierarchy in clothes; the idea of white or blue collar workers stems from there.”
Uniforms and “correct clothing for people holding particular positions” in certain professions outlines this hierarchy, Chris said.
“But these days, as people are dressing more casually, this hierarchy is being eroded. Even then, if we look at job interviews, it still stands that interviewers will see the shine on a candidate’s shoes to gauge how much effort he has put into the application and how serious he is about getting the job.”
Chris said such behaviour is mirrored in nature.
“In the animal kingdom,when it comes to finding a mate, the animal that invests heavily into looking good generally walks away with the prize.”
The BBC Three series is in the production stage and letters have been sent out to various companies inviting them to take part in Naked Office. The channel has promised would-be participants that the project would be “very productive… a day to remember”.
Source :
DNA
