For women it is harder: the subtle changes in their status require one moment the power dressing of the Eighties, the next the expensive discretion of women in the Nineties."We advise women to wear make up," says a spokeswoman for the Colour Me Beautiful image consultants. The denier of stockings is a choice the bank feels its female employee is able to make unaided.For men in the back office or the City firm, dressing is relatively straightforward: a uniform familiar from school. The Midland, while anxious that its counter staff should be identifiable (partly for security reasons), offers them a choice of clothes, including skirts or trousers for women, suits, blazers, maternity outfits and saris Beards and male ear-rings are fine. The tribunal had no truck with the idea that short back and sides was inherently masculine, and ruled instead that it was detrimental and fundamentally unfair to allow women to have long hair but not men.This must come as interesting news for those regional rail companies that have just banned ponytails on men.In the real world of the market those barometers of respectability, Marks and Spencer and the Midland Bank, long ago dropped any idea of enforcing a male short back and sides. Last week the Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled that the supermarket chain Safeway was guilty of sex discrimination in sacking Nicholas Smith for wearing his hair in a waist-length ponytail Safeway wanted conventionality from its employees. Its employees had shared those regimented experiences andtook it more easily.

But their successors see the army approach as counterproductive. Consultation and choice are the watchwords of the market now."Good workwear, so long as it's practical and the staff are consulted, can make people feel part of a gang. But very strict uniform, corporate dress, gives the wrong message," says Ms Donovan."It makes people who should be thinking for themselves seem asthough they can't. Customers are looking for someone in a business who can treat them as individuals, and the sight of a uniform makes them think they're dealing with a zombie."The hostility, in the newspapers and on British Rail platforms, which has greeted the railway companies' new nit-picking regulations is reinforced because so many of them seem to have no purpose except to preserve surburban Fifties prejudices.The mood has changed not only among customers and the corporate handbooks, but also in the courts.

If the directors of the new regional railway companies are truly eager to make money in the new, privatised future, they should also contemplate thefact that modern management thinking deems their sort of approach to dress regulations hopelessly outdated.Control of the workforce with petty restrictions about ear-ring size and whiskers was popular with a management generation that had gone through the Second World War, or at least National Service. Or, to put it another way, "Like any army, if you want to terrify the life out of your opponent, you march up to him all 100 of you in the same dress." That is the opinion of Janine Donovan, a consultant with the management consultancy firm Wolff Olins.Whether the new-style dress of railway employees can be any more offputting than the old is a moot point. Regulated dress is usually reserved for the servant classes of a company: those who meet the client face to face in junior capacities.Management handbooks deal lyrically with the team spirit and sense of purpose to be donned along with a company uniform. In some areas men must cut their hair and shave their beards In others,0 patterned socks are forbidden. At Manchester's Piccadilly station, women wearing the new navy and red uniforms of Regional Railways must complement these with near-sheer stockings in black or barely black.

By some tracks women may wear earrings no bigger than a 10p coin, while men may not wear ear-rings at all. This looks at first glance like the corporate culture of the free market being put into early effect, the dirty traces of nationalised industry being cleaned away. But is private enterprise really so heavy handed?Certainly the free-market culture approves to some extent of corporate dressing, at least for employees who need workwear - the blue-collar workers - and for service staff dealing face to face with customers. In the back office and the boardroom a different kind of corporate dress evolves according to unwritten rules: the ambitious employee dresses like his bosses.But the code of dark City suits, or the Bohemian touches in the dress of employees in design firms, is voluntary. The regional companies that now run British Rail are, in the run-up to privatisation, issuing strict codes for personal dress and appearance. O brave new world that has such porters in it, unbearded and in 15-denier stockings.