Nuts. I LOVE wearing blue denim shirts with Levi’s.
The “grease monkey look.” Very hip.
I work at a high-tech company, and the people who don’t wear blue jeans are regarded as weird.
Hell, the VPs regularly show up in cargo shorts and Birkenstocks.
Obviously the person in drewbert’s upstairs management has never visited Dublin…
Hmmmm, maybe you should do what this guy did…
It’s a class thing - only the working class wore blue jeans (pre-60’s). Maybe HR should be informed that Eisenhauer is no longer prez?
See also:
Ties
Shiny shoes
White gloves
All things that prove you don’t do manual labor - if you did, they’d wouldn’t look so good.
Ain’t class struggle grand?
ahh yes. How this reminds me of the Sturdy Trousers™ that you see middle-classers wearing in old movies, whenever they engaged in outdoor activities. They seemed always to be some sort of thick khaki or something similar.
We have no dress code. Any attempt to enforce one would be illegal.
I say it’s because people are hungry for power and control. Pants are pants. If these people really wanna go after legwear, go after skin tight jeans or tights, since every curve of your lower body is practically exposed in them. I don’t see how these women can be comfortable like that.
Welcome to the straight dope message board. No one else has posted in this thread for 22 years, and i imagine dress codes have changed some in that time period.
I didn’t at first notice this was a zombie. In the 90s my wife worked at a translation bureau (big in Montreal). She was required to wear a blouse and skirt, even in the dead of winter (-25C, anyone). In the dead of winter she ignored the directive. She was also required to have her desktop clear every evening. She had no contact with the clients, zero. It was just control.
Since we’re here… I’ve worked with people who felt that denim was just ‘scruffy’ - not that it can’t possibly be smart, or at least neat and tidy, but the hardwearing nature of denim means it’s perhaps more likely than other fabrics to still be in physically serviceable shape, after it is faded and worn-looking - so people could still be wearing it when a garment made from other material might have literal holes in it.
Not that I have a stake in the whole thing anyway, but I think this, together with the characterisation of denim as attire for manual labour, is probably most of it.
The OP was from 22 years ago. Times have changed and attitudes have changed. I have had 3 “real” (i.e. professional career, not McJobs) in my life (over almost 40 years). EACH ONE of them was “suit-and-tie” when I started. Then, they had their first ever layoffs (or downsizing or rightsizing or whatever the euphamism was at the time). Then, they went to business casual (i.e. no jeans, but you don’t need a tie). My current job says “dress for the day”, meaning jeans are OK, unless you are meeting with upper management, or there are outsiders coming in or…
I think one of the reasons against jeans is that they are often used for manual labor around the house, so can easily be dirty, or ripped, or whatever. Let’s add in fashons with ripped jeans that can be NSFW, and it’s much easier to say “No jeans” than it is to say “clean, no rips, etc.” You say no jeans, it’s easier to police.
Yeah, I’m an old fart. I work from home, but still wear button-down shirts (and the occasional tie) because it makes me feel more business-like. I’m not insane - I tend to wear lounge pants to be comfortable, but I almost never wear t-shirts or sweatshirts.
I used to work in an ad agency. The dress code was pretty casual - except for the one day we got an email with suggested dress code:
“If you choose to wear jeans tomorrow, please make sure they are Levi’s”
We got the contract.
I turned up in size 31 super tight-fit* faded 1970s style bell-bottoms that I found in a second hand store, but the Levi’s people never came near my backend office space.
- size 31 is one inch less than what i normally wear, oh to be 20 and be skinny again!
The only thing I was sanctioned over at a job was wearing a tee shirt. However, I wasn’t wearing a tee shirt. I pointed out that it was in fact a women’s short-sleeved blouse. My manager told me I was losing points because it was a “tee-like shirt,” (though it wasn’t).
Note the controversy recently about Magnus Carlsen wearing jeans to a chess tournament:
Go down about halfway to a section labeled 2024.
Prior to COVID, my employer had a business casual dress policy. During COVID, those who actually had to come in the office were told to dress for their day and we kept that policy when people actually returned to the office.
I think most of us would agree there should be some standards for attire in the workplace even if we don’t necessarily agree on the particulars. Nobody’s going to be happy if I show up to work wearing the latest in Lord Humungus fashions, right? Really the question is what is and isn’t appropriate to the work environment which is highly variable.
As someone who works in HR, I can tell you most of us hate dealing with dress code issues. We’ve got better stuff to do. At my company, it didn’t help that some managers enforced the code, others ignored it, and even some executives ignored it when it suited them. Employees get pissed when they see people under one manager wearing sneakers every day while their manager won’t allow it.
In 2018, I was tasked with coming up with a new dress code and running it by middle managers in a series of focus groups. In a nutshell, it was basically dress for your day, allowing employees to wear jeans, collared shirts, sneakers, and even hats so long as there were no logos or words on them. I argued employees would prefer this as it meant they spent less on clothing and it would help with both recruitment and retention. Middle management was overwhelmingly positive to the idea of change but our executives put the kibosh on it. One thing they were worried about was how unprofessional our employees would look when they went to lunch.
If you have a dress code you’re always going to have someone asking, “If X is okay then why can’t we have Y?” You’ve got to draw the line somewhere, right?
We are currently having a debate about what the definition of “sneakers” is. Apparently for women there are things called “dress sneakers”, which some people claim aren’t really sneakers even though they look like sneakers.
Thankfully my three [much younger] employees dress way “higher” than any interpretation of the minimums of the dress code. They all like to dress up a bit, or maybe they are taking cues from me. Other managers in our broader have had to have a word with their young team members about this or that being unacceptable, but I’ve been spared. I’ve been a manager for 30+ years, but if I have to speak to a female employee about her attire, I’m going to find it really awkward.
First off, welcome to the boards.
Second off, would you possibly explain how your first post is in response to a 22 year old thread?
More on topic, my work has never had a strict dress code. Very hard to write such that someone doesn’t push the boundaries. IMO, nice, well fitting jeans would look a helluva lot better than ill-fitting, soiled or ripped dress pants. The only instance I recall of a dress code being enforced was when our public-facing receptionist deemed it appropriate to wear a t-shirt advertising a strip club. (Also the only cow-orker I recall being hauled away by cops - for kiddie porn on his work computer! A special case indeed!)
One of the best compliments I received when running that office was when one staffer wore a blazer. When I told her she looked sharp, she said since I had taken over it was the first time she thought the office was professional enough to warrant wearing it.
Back in the day, I wore a suit and tie every day. For several years before covid I had gone down to dockers, white dress shirt, and tie when I went into the office. After covid, I wear whatever I woulda worn at home - generally jeans and a polo in warm weather, long-sleeved knit shirt or flannel when cool.
Maybe I just used to wear the wrong jeans, but I’ve never understood this. Dress pants / slacks / trousers / whatever you want to call them are way more comfortable than jeans. Back when I was a kid, before I had much choice in what to wear, I sometimes had to wear jeans to school. They were always more uncomfortable than non-jean pants. In particular they tend to chafe in the popliteal area (behind the knees). At least the ones that I would wear back in the day did.
A significant number of first-time posters here create accounts in order to respond to very old threads, as search engines like Google return results from the SDMB. In this case, I could see someone googling something like “why do dress codes not allow denim,” getting a link to that thread as a result, and deciding to weigh in, without spending time (or caring) to see that it’s an old conversation.
From what I’ve seen, a fair number of such first-time posters wind up being of the “one and done” variety: they never come back, they never post again.