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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
One morning last fall, the designer Yeohlee Teng was standing outside her office building, on Seventh Avenue at Thirty-ninth Street, waiting for a ride to the hospital. Yeohlee designs and owns the line of pricey but practical women's sportswear and evening clothes that bears her name, and she has a small, loyal following that includes Susan Sontag, Oprah Winfrey, Patti Smith, and, now, Valley Hospital, a four-hundred-and-fifty-one-bed facility in Ridgewood, New Jersey. About eight months earlier, Yeohlee had signed a contract with Valley to redesign the garments worn by both the patients and the staff, beginning with Valley's more than a thousand registered nurses. Today, she was going to present the Valley management with muslin prototypes of those uniforms.
As anyone who has been in a hospital in recent years knows, the white dress, which was for decades the emblem of a registered nurse, has all but disappeared. These days, the R.N.s wear "scrubs," those loosely fitting cotton pants and V-neck tunics, and sometimes a short jacket with big pockets. Because scrubs, which are made in a rainbow of colors and a variety of prints, have become the standard hospital attire for nurses, orderlies, technicians, and maintenance personnel alike, patients have no easy way of knowing whether the person putting in the I.V. is a nurse, a nurse's assistant, or a groundskeeper. Reintroducing uniforms would help to reestablish a sartorial hierarchy in the hospital.
"Nurses are one of the most important aspects of health care, but in most hospitals you can't tell who they are," Yeohlee explained, speaking precisely, as she sat with perfect posture in the back of a town car heading for Jersey. Yeohlee, who was born in Malaysia, came to New York in the early nineteen-seventies to study at Parsons School of Design, and has lived here ever since. She represents herself as an anti-fashion designer, a clothing architect who is more concerned with comfort and maintenance than with glamour and display; she describes her clothes as "shelters." Today, she was sheltering in a short black raincoat, black pants, a black knit top, black leather boots with thick work soles, and the kind of black rectangular glasses favored by people who are serious about design. "Uniforms make people feel proud of their work," she continued, "and if you're a highly trained professional, like a nurse, you want people to know it." She thought for a moment, bowing her head so that her dense black hair concealed most of her face. "There's a terrible nursing shortage going on right now," she said, "and I have this romantic notion that if the uniforms looked more attractive more people would want to go into the profession."
The elderly woman behind the reception desk at Valley Hospital was wearing a pink jacket. Yeohlee, who asked to see the hospital's C.E.O. and president, Audrey Meyers, knew from her research that pink meant the woman was one of Valley's three thousand volunteers.
"Is she a patient?" the receptionist asked.
"She's the president of the hospital," Yeohlee said. "Please tell her Yeohlee is here."
"Yo-lee?"
"Y-E-O-H-L-E-E."
"Is that your first name or your last name?"
Yeohlee gave a slightly ominous-sounding sigh.
"Just say Yeohlee. She'll know."
The designer took a seat on a floral-patterned chair and looked around the lobby, a large two-story space with expensive lighting and, in one corner, a grand piano. In recent years, hospitals have begun to look more and more like hotels (at a time when fashionable hotels are looking more and more like hospitals, with gleaming expanses of glass and plastic). Where there was once linoleum there is now carpeting; white walls are now burgundy or beige. These changes are made partly in order to promote "a healing environment," but they're also expected to improve the institution's image. Valley, which was founded fifty-one years ago, and has long served as Ridgewood's community hospital, nowadays has to compete with other hospitals in Bergen and Passaic Counties for prospective patients, especially those seeking elective surgery, maternity care, and fertility treatment. At Hackensack University Medical Center, about eight miles south of Valley, uniformed doormen welcome...
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