Wall Street could learn a thing or two from the catwalks of fashion: transparency is in, opaque is out.
In Paris, models in nude bodysuits opened Martin Margiela’s 20th-anniversay show. At New York’s fashion week in early fall, models strutted in sheer garments by designers like Marc Jacobs and Derek Lam.
“We felt we had been surrounded by something so restrictive for the last few years, and we wanted to start with the idea of lightness this season,” Alex Adams, a designer, told The Times’s Eric Wilson.
In an age in which people seem to want to show and see all, in which the details of high finance, your co-workers’ salaries, even genetic codes are open for public view - some people wonder: Is the world really open to being more open?
Perhaps it should be.
It was precisely a lack of transparency that got the world’s financial system in trouble, with its complicated portfolios of derivative securities that were as opaque as a pair of black winter tights.
In Norway, on the other hand, officials of the country’s 10-year-old government investment fund attribute much of their success to its transparency. The fund is the world’s second largest with more than $400 billion . “If you disclose it in detail, there is nowhere to hide,” Yngve Slyngstad, the chief executive , said about investing in an article by Gregory Roth. “The results are visible to everyone.”
So are the goings-on in a growing number of glass skyscrapers around the world. Abu Dhabi and Shanghai are exemplars of the trend toward visibility .
“‘Transparency’ is the architectural watchword of the era, almost guaranteed to appear in any reference to contemporary” structures, wrote The Times’s David Dunlap. In Beijing, Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV television authority headquarters has glass peepholes. “Staff and visitors move in parallel, can observe each other, can meet and congregate,” Ole Scheeren, the partner in charge of the project, said.
Observing colleagues is one thing, but visibility can go further - to payroll numbers. The Times’ Lisa Belkin writes that “there are signs that salary negotiation is inching toward greater transparency.”
Web sites like Glassdoor.com and blogs have sprung up promoting the idea of salary transparency. Employees at companies like WorldBlu in Texas, which advocates “democratic workplaces,” know what others are paid. “If people are paid what they are worth, there is no reason for people to feel uncomfortable about sharing salary information,” said Traci Fenton, WorldBlu’s chief executive.
It is now possible to know not only other people’s numbers, but also their letters - ACTG to be exact - or DNA code. As genetic tests become cheaper, more people are paying to learn about their genome and posting the results online, according to an article by Allen Salkin.
Amy Harmon of The Times recently told of the Personal Genome Project at Harvard University Medical School, which is aimed at “challenging the conventional wisdom that the secrets of our genes are best kept to ourselves.”
Participants agree to disclose their DNA results online in the hopes of speeding medical research.
Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google and husband of Anne Wojcicki, a cofounder of 23andMe, revealed on his blog that he has a higher than average risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. “There’s a much better chance that you will learn something useful if you are not trying to hide it,” he said.
Whether that “it” is DNA or tricky investments , opening up may be a form of catharsis and comfort. Or, as Robert Hohman, a founder of Glassdoor.com, the salary Web site, said: “Information is good and more information is better.”