(FORTUNE Magazine) – Not long ago we had a visit in our Rockefeller Center offices from Alex Mandl, recently named to become president of AT&T in 1997 and the man who oversaw its acquisition of McCaw Cellular last year. Unsurprisingly, he was dressed in standard executive attire: a dark suit with a patterned tie and one of those horizontally striped power shirts with a white collar.

What, I asked, did he wear when he traveled to McCaw in Seattle? "Certainly not this," he said. "In fact, we don't even wear ties at headquarters [in New Jersey] anymore unless we're expecting a visit from someone like you." When a group of normally chino-clad McCaw execs showed up in New Jersey recently, they had on suits; the AT&T execs wore chinos.

You get the idea. Business life today--the subject of our practical-minded cover package--can be confusing, even intimidating, when it comes to business fashion. What to wear, when, and where: It just isn't as simple as it used to be. To document how complicated it can get, we dispatched William Nabers--normally our assistant picture editor--to report, write, and produce the first big fashion article FORTUNE has run in many years. Since we normally don't "do" fashion, we reached out beyond our normal stable of photographers for the job. Photo researcher Alix Colow commissioned, we think, the best possible photographer for this assignment: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, whose timeless style and accomplishment in fashion work made him an easy choice.

Nabers persuaded a fascinating, eclectic group of people, from a movie studio head to a security guard, to pose for his project, and Greenfield-Sanders did a magnificent job of capturing not only them and their clothes but their attitudes as well, using the biggest Polaroid camera you've ever seen. Then designer Maria Keehan created a handsome package that we now know is exactly what a FORTUNE fashion portfolio is supposed to look like.

Okay, if you just hate clothes--but love politics--this issue has something else new for you. To our extreme delight we have signed a new columnist as a regular contributor from Washington. David Shribman, Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe and a winner of last year's Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting, begins his new column, called O Democracy after a favorite phrase of poet Walt Whitman's, on page 67. It speaks for itself.