A Modest Uniform For Your Cleaning Help, 100% Glatt Kosher
An avid Facebook user posted a photo of an ad for a clothing company from what we can only presume is a Jewish publication.
“Cleaning Help Cover Ups” the headline blares. Apparently, within the Orthodox community, cleaning help sometimes show up to work in immodest garb. Although the ad doesn’t specify what kinds of risque getups these lewd women wear, we can only imagine that it must involve very little cloth (which, considering that cleaning help average $10 an hour, is probably all they can afford, the advertisers might surmise).
Luckily for us, Prestige Attire has the answer in the form of a baggy, high-neck t-shirt. To be fair, many workplaces do require some form of a uniform. But this company goes a step further — printed on the right chest is a smiley face with a flower on its head and, beneath it, the tagline “Best Housekeeper.”
Beyond this blatant display of condescension, the ad mires itself further into the muck of WTFery. Along the side of the ad is a row of speech balloons filled with positive reviews from anonymous customers; highlights include: “Choosing the color from the ad herself made her happy to wear it.”
And: “She was so comfortable she forgot to take it off when she left!”
And, because it always circles back to men and their inability to act like civilized human beings: “Makes my husband and boys comfortable.”
In other words, the perfect cleaning help cover up, 100% glatt kosher guaranteed.
Michelle Honig is a writer at the Forward. Contact her at [email protected]. Find her on Instagram and Twitter.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO