Forced to.
We make poverty wages, & are required to dress up.
I hate it, and the man who came up with it. He is a rich, silver-spoon-in-his-mouth fatcat, who is utterly out of touch with his employees.
When I worked at my first Sears, the male sales clerks were required to wear suits (admittedly not WONDERFUL suits), or at least shirts & ties. This was hard on some, but happily the store would, on the first Friday of each month, give large discounts on business wear to all employees. (It might have been the first weekend of the month; it was many moons ago). And unlike some businesses I could name, they didn’t charge the uniform-wearing employees for their first three uniform shirt & pants, and as long as you turned the uniform in when requesting a new one, the replacements were also free.
When I sold cars in 2002 or so, the dealership I worked for required salespeople to wear either business attire for buy a ridiculously-overpriced uniform shirt from them. I’m talking forty, fifty bucks for a cheap polo shirt. They also charged everyone who worked there $2/week for coffee (taken automatically from the paycheck), on the grounds that we were supposed to offer customers free cups whenever they sat at the desk, and the $2 was to defray that cost. Jackasses.
Not that uncommon in Silicon Valley. Wasn’t there a kerfuffle about Zuckerberg dressing up to meet Obama?
I’m a stagehand, so mine is strict in some ways, lax in others. Half the time, it’s totally lax; work clothes, where ripped or stained T-shirts are fine because we probably ripped or stained them at work anyway. The rest of the time, it’s selectively strict. We’ve got to wear black clothes, including socks, shoes, and long sleeves and long pant legs, and if you showed up more than a couple times without them, you could get fired. Logos on the shirts are a no-go. That said, no one cares if it’s a button-down with a tie or a T-shirt.
Luckily, we don’t have a dress code. The principal will talk to any teacher who isn’t dressed “appropriately,” but that’s about it. PE teachers wear shorts and t-shirts 24/7, for example. The newer the teacher, the nicer and more dressy the dress. I’ve been here 26 years, which means I can wear black jeans or Dockers, sneakers and Hawaiian shirts and nobody gives me any crap about it.
If I ever wore something other than a Hawaiian shirt, I think the school would lock down from shock. 
We recently went from being allowed to wear jeans to only being allowed to wear them on Fridays (among a few other changes).
I do resent it, a little. Not because I mind wearing nice pants 4 days out of the week. What prompted the change was a handful of women with the habit of showing up to work looking like hoochies. Instead of being pulled aside and talked to, they slapped the other 800 of us with a dress code.
Sometimes individual offenders DO need to be singled out, but nobody has the balls to do so. They just go ahead and punish the 90% who weren’t breaking the rules to begin with.
When you talk to just the individual offenders, they go to HR and claim they’re being picked on, and you discover that someone barely competent at their job has an eidetic memory when it comes to what everyone else has worn for the previous 10 years.
The only way to beat that is to come down on everyone for every infraction, no matter how minor, and you’re right that most managers aren’t willing to do that day-in and day-out. Not only is it exhausting chasing people down for petty crap, but you wind up becoming the “special ed” teacher - you get the people the other managers don’t want to deal with. I got disgusted with meetings where I found out I was getting transferred someone simply because no one had the guts to fire them.
In response to the OP
No, I don’t have to anymore, but I did have a job once where I did. I had to wear a shirt and tie, to sit in an office and make phone calls all day. No actual face-to-face contact was made with customers in this business.
It was supposed to promote a “professional environment” but in actuality it was just ridiculous. Furthermore, in the summer it gets hot and the long sleeve shirt is a huge nuisance. So tired of this shit.
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I’m a stagehand, so mine is strict in some ways, lax in others…
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Sure, but “show blacks” has a distinct purpose, namely, to make you invisible to the audience, rather than to look “professional.”
Hopefully your call dress codes aren’t as fine-toothed as IATSE Local 16 - who came up with “Neat” vs “Super Neat”? And ironically, Coat & Tie does not seem to require a tie.
Work Clothes (WC): Casual, clean clothes; long pants (jeans); shirt, appropriate work shoes.
Neat Work Clothes (NWC): Neat but casual dress. Clean, collared shirt, khakis or casual slacks, clean shoes other than tennis shoes or boots.
Super Neat Work Clothes, or Business Casual(SNWC or Biz Cas): Dress shirt or Polo shirt, dark, dress slacks, dress shoes.
**Neat Work Blacks (NWB): **This is the same as Super Neat Work Clothes, but all of the clothes must be black.
Show Blacks (SBLKS): This is the same as work clothes but all of the clothes must be black.
Coat and Tie (C&T): This means that you should wear a conservative style dark coat and pants, a light colored dress shirt and dress shoes Women should wear dark slacks, a light shirt or blouse appropriate for the business atmosphere and a similar blazer or dress jacket. (Skirts are not practical.)
Suit: Matching dress slacks and coat with a dress shirt, a tie and practical dress shoes. Women should wear a business suit with slacks, and practical dress shoes. (Skirts are not practical.)
Symphony Dress (SYMP): This is the same as a suit but with black slacks and coat.
Tuxedo (TUX): A black tuxedo.
Are you kidding? I’m in Oregon. Non-ripped clothes is about all you can ask of these hippies ;).
Seriously, I disagree that the only purpose of show blacks is to render you invisible to the audience. My boss would be upset if I showed up in a skintight black body stocking, because although it would render me invisible just as well, it would look strange, draw attention, and make the whole stage crew look unprofessional through non-conformity. Show blacks clearly do have a distinct practical purpose, but there are elements of the dress code that are there to establish professionalism through conformity, not practicality.
Panty Free Fridays? 
Thinking more about this…
It probably wasn’t too long ago in your company when women couldn’t wear pants and had to wear hosiery. Shouldn’t some things change?
We’re more or less business casual. Slacks and decent shoes are mandatory. I could probably get away with wearing a polo shirt every day, but I generally opt for a button-down shirt (long or short sleeved) and a sweater vest. Some of my coworkers wear a tie every day, but I only throw on a tie for Special Occassions.
I simply don’t understand the rules for women. From my perspective it seems like a female in a “business casual” environment can more or less wear whatever she wants and get away with it.
Ass Wednesdays.
My office is business casual Monday - Thursday, casual Friday. 95% of the men (I won’t get into women because I don’t understand how the dress code applies to them) wear khakis and polos. I wear black slacks and a button down shirt. My preference would be for the dress code to either be casual (jeans and a button down shirt or company branded t-shirt) or business (full suit and tie). I hate this ambiguous, half-assed “business casual” concept; it just feels incomplete and uncomfortable.
At my first office job the code was “business casual” - blouses and nice pants, blouses and skirts, or dresses. Dress shoes. Nylons/hose required.
The owner’s wife got after me one time because I’d worn boots to the office, but forgot my dress shoes. So, on the rare occasions I left my cubicle, I was in hose-covered feet. My feet were roasting in those boots! When I tried to explain that my boots were too hot, she demanded to see them before grumpily conceding that yes, they looked hot, and maybe I had a point.
We did have casual Fridays where we could wear jeans and tennies (as long as no one “important” was visiting the office).
At my next office job I was at a call center, so I could wear jeans and tennis shoes most of the time. Then at the last temp job I had our code was a bit more strict: nice blouses, black dress pants, dress shoes. Despite the severity of the dress code I really did like it there, so I guess it really depends.
I’ve always worked in business casual offices, and nearly always bent the dress code a bit with black jeans paired with dressier items of apparel like a nice shirt, shoes, and sometimes jacket. I really don’t mind dressing up in principle but being a short guy I have a hard time finding good clothes–trousers especially–that fit well. I understand the cuts and styles of men’s suits have been changing so I probably should go shopping again, on the assumption the newer fits will work better on me.
They can’t do too much to men’s trousers other than shorten the length if need be. It’s been my impression over the last 20 years that all the manufacturers of men’s trousers–basically everything except jeans–cut the seat/hip area for guys who are at least 6 feet tall; if you are thinner in the waist than average, and several inches below average in height, they never fit well. If you think about the way a trouser seat is put together, there’s really not much they can do to fix that.
No adult likes to walk around in clothes that look like hand-me-downs from some older relative, newly shortened by one’s mother. It’s uncomfortable because when you sit down you tend to lose things out of your pockets, and the hems hike way up your lower legs. I think that latter issue is probably a result of the trouser legs being overly wide.
You need to find a new tailor. Or a sewing machine. You can alter the seat, the rear, the waistband, the crotch…you can alter anything to make it smaller or change the shape. (Altering to make it bigger is tricky, and more likely in expensive pants with generous seam allowances.)
True in a general sense, but I feel the need to qualify. My mother was a seamstress, and she cautioned me a few times (because I hadn’t listened closely enough the first time) that there was a limit to what she could in the way of altering pants, and that a store that had promised to take eight inches off the waist for me was lying.