Badgered by Bosses Over IDs, Pent-Up Workers Get Creative
By IANTHE JEANNE DUGAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
At a time of heightened security, a new fashion dilemma is raging in the workplace: just how to wear those clunky ID cards bearing photo, employee number, rank and department. Companies all over the nation have spent millions on picture badges, plastic cases and lanyards. Beefed-up security forces insist that they be ever visible.
Now, employees are resorting to imaginative alternatives to the standard-issue strings some call nooses. They are concocting fancier holders out of eyeglass holders, converting clips into corsages, hanging cards from purses and bobbing them from rosaries.
When the magazine publisher Condé Nast began cracking down, it was a tough adjustment for Candy Pratts Price, a longtime accessories director at Vogue who recently became executive fashion editor of its Style.com Web site. This is a woman who would rather lose her eyeglasses than wear an eyeglass chain. As a lifelong New Yorker who uses mass transportation, she doesn't even have a driver's license. What to do?
"I went to the Adidas shop and bought a black and white whistle holder," Ms. Pratts Price says. She used it for her photo ID and her office key, and reluctantly hung it around her neck. A colleague told her, "You look like a gym teacher." Her photo, she says, "looked like E.T." It felt uncomfortable and clashed with her jewelry. Soon, it was buried in her purse.
She left the purse in the office recently when she ran across the street with Vogue's editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, for a meeting at VH1, where Ms. Pratts Price is creative director of the VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards. Neither was carrying picture identification. Ms. Wintour, she says, showed the guards an American Express card and they were allowed in.