🦓 Zebra Stripes

Every hotel uniform is a decision somebody made in a room you were not invited to.

For the first stretch of my time at the Westin, that decision had produced a deep navy polyester suit with gold stripes that looked like pilot wings but had none of the cool. Hot in summer, stiff in winter, and permanently suggestive of a discount airline crew waiting on a delayed departure.

Which had one genuinely excellent side effect. The Westin Seattle housed a lot of actual flight crews, and when real pilots came through the lobby in real wings while we stood there in our approximation of the same idea, the resemblance did a great deal of comedic work without anybody having to say anything.

They were wearing out, though. Tattered cuffs, shine at the elbows. Everyone agreed it was time.

Somebody, Somewhere, in a Boardroom

Early 2000s. Starwood was mid-rebrand, pivoting the whole company toward wellness, and a great deal of new language was arriving from corporate about how things were going to feel now.

Somewhere in that process — in a meeting I would pay real money to have attended — a decision got made about Service Express.

Officially we were Service Express. Around the building we had long been Circus Express, and it was earned: luggage, room service, calls, toothbrushes, guest drama, late-night weirdness, VIP secrets, all of it simultaneously, with a smile. The stated reasoning, as it reached us, was that guests should be able to identify us more easily. See the uniform, know who to ask.

That was the plan. Presumably.

So about thirty of us went down to the seamstress. Because it is the Westin, and of course there is a seamstress.

The Unboxing, Before That Was a Thing

She opened the boxes.

And the honest first reaction in that room, from several people at once, was that these had to be the wrong ones. Somebody had crossed an order. These belonged to another property, another company, a themed restaurant somewhere.

And it did not stop at the stripes. The stripes were the headline.

The missing collar is what finishes it. A collar is the thing that tells the eye this is a uniform, this is a professional garment, this person works here. Remove it from a horizontally striped polyester top with 1980s shoulder pads and you have cut the last line tethering it to workwear.

What is left is a costume. Not a good one.

They were tailored at the start, at least. That lasted about as long as you would expect.

Wearing It

Summer was the worst of it. Scratchy blend, long sleeves, no ventilation, and a job that involved being under a tour bus in the luggage bay hauling suitcases out by hand. The foam pads made no sense in any weather and became genuinely oppressive in July.

And after a few days, they smelled. Not the fabric — the shoulders. Foam absorbs and foam keeps. The hotel had a laundry service and they came back nominally clean, but the smell had gone into the padding and stayed there. Baked in.

Two things about them were, grudgingly, good.

The fabric was treated with something close to Teflon. Coffee, food, water — anything you spilled beaded up and rolled straight off. In twenty-one years of hotel work that is not nothing.

And there was no tie. Small mercy, genuinely felt.

He was right, and I have thought about it since. Add the classic round bellman’s cap and white gloves to that outfit and it tips from unfortunate into something you could not walk into a lobby wearing.

The Westin Serengeti

Individually, you looked odd. That was survivable.

The problem was the lobby.

The Westin Seattle has an enormous lobby, and at any given moment there might be six or eight of us moving through it in different directions — bell carts, luggage, room service, all of it. Thirty people in wide horizontal black and white stripes, crossing open ground in a group.

We looked like zebras. Not approximately. We looked like a herd of zebras crossing a plain.

Which is where the Danimal comes in.

If you have read the other stories and wondered where that phrase came from, that is where. It was about us. Thirty adults in striped polyester crossing a marble plain — and it was, in fairness, entirely accurate about everything except the species.

What the Guests Said

The comment that stuck, delivered by an actual guest, with no apparent malice and no possible defence:

Which is when the Hamburglar entered the conversation permanently and never really left. Black and white horizontal stripes, no collar. Once somebody says it, it cannot be unsaid, and it was said constantly for five years.

Others went with convicts. Chain gang. Elmo or the Danimal — I genuinely cannot remember which, and it may well have been both on different days — laughed out loud the first time and said we looked like a chain gang.

The split by age was consistent and strange. Kids loved them. Kids thought the stripes were fantastic, and several wanted one for themselves. Adults felt sorry for us. You could watch it land on their faces — the moment they registered that a grown professional was required to wear this to work, and decided not to say anything about it.

Which had one measurable consequence I am not especially proud of and will report anyway: the tips got better. Guilt tips. There is nothing quite like starting a shift in a ridiculous outfit and having somebody press a twenty into your hand out of what can only be described as sympathy.

Elmo’s Ruling

Elmo had been on that bell desk for fifty-three years. If you wanted to know where something ranked in the history of the building, you asked Elmo, and Elmo would tell you whether your problem was actually a problem.

His verdict on the zebra stripes was that they were bad.

They were not, however, the worst.

That is the correct response from a man with fifty-three years on the floor. Not sympathy. Perspective. You think this is bad, and you are right, and I once hand-tied a mauve bow tie every single shift.

The Starwood Standard

We raised concerns. Everybody raised concerns. It went nowhere, and the phrase that came back was always the same one.

Starwood Standard.

That was the end of the conversation. It was the standard, it was how things were going to be, and there were already ninety of the things in the building, so the economics had settled the argument before anyone thought to have it.

You could not refuse. And you could not modify either — people tried, quietly, the way people do. Taking something in here, leaving something off there. It never survived. The uniforms went out to laundry and came back as stock, and whatever you had done to yours had been laundered out of existence and replaced with another identical zebra suit.

Then somebody came back from a trip and mentioned that the Westin in Hawaii wore shorts and Hawaiian shirts.

Other properties, it turned out, were in solid colors. Normal clothes. Things a person might actually select. Nobody else we ever heard of was wearing horizontal stripes, and no explanation for the discrepancy was ever offered to us.

I have no evidence for that. It is entirely possible the truth is duller. But it is what thirty people in striped polyester concluded, and I have never heard a better explanation.

Five Years

That is the number that still gets me. Not the design — designs are subjective, somebody presumably liked it, and I have been wrong about clothes before.

Five years is the thing.

Five years of the same joke from guests, and from other departments, and from ourselves, because what else are you going to do. Five years out of a decision that took an afternoon somewhere back east.

And here is what I actually want to say about it, because it is the part that matters.

Front of house means being looked at. That is the job. You are the first thing a guest sees after a long flight and the last thing they see leaving. You learn to carry yourself a particular way, because how you carry yourself is the service.

Being looked at all day, every day, in something you are embarrassed by is genuinely demeaning. I am not going to dress that up. It wears on people.

And they wore it anyway. All of them. Thirty people kept moving luggage and answering radios and taking care of guests, in stripes, for five years, and the guests mostly never knew anything was wrong.

If anything it unified us, in the specific way a shared enemy unifies people. Nobody liked them. Everybody knew nobody liked them. That is its own kind of solidarity, and it was the only thing the uniform gave us worth having.

Where It Went

Eventually the bosses stopped liking them either, and another decision got made in another room, and what replaced them was genuinely good — properly tailored, a sharp vest, a complete 180. Somebody, somewhere, had learned something.

Nobody kept a zebra suit. Why would you.

There is almost certainly still one somewhere in that building, down in the laundry, in the back of something. It would be a hunt. I would not bet against it.

And here is the strangest part. I cannot find a photograph. I have looked. The internet appears to have erased them entirely — no staff photos, no guest snapshots, nothing. Five years, ninety garments, thirty people, and as far as the searchable record is concerned it never happened.

I know it happened.

Twenty-one years is a lot of uniforms, and nothing else is close. The navy pilot suit was unflattering and I would put it on again tomorrow without complaint. The stripes were a different category of object entirely.

Ask anyone who worked Service Express at the Westin Seattle in the early 2000s. You do not have to specify which one. Say stripes and they are already going, and they will keep going for a while.

In fairness to whoever made that call, the stated goal was that guests should be able to spot us instantly, from anywhere in the lobby, and know exactly who we were.

On that specific measure, it worked perfectly.