I fly planes for a living - that’s not white collar, but you are generally expected to dress up for interviews. I was an airline pilot for a while and then decided to go into charter. Got an interview, took the day off and jump-seated down the morning of.
Having worn my airline uniform on the flight I arrived at the interview not as early as I’d hoped, and decided not to change clothes. I figured an airline uniform wouldn’t be out of place, it would signal my qualifications and I could change later on (it was an all-day interview process). Wouldn’t be surprised if a few others did the same.
So pulling my roll-aboard behind me, I open the door to the swanky meeting room and find… a dozen guys in very nice suits, looking at me as if I’d just shat in the punch bowl. For the rest of the day I was clearly “THAT guy”.
Not everyone got hired that day, but I did. For good or bad, I definitely stood out from the pack.
I’ve never worn jeans, but I’ve also never work a dress and hose and heels, nor would I take a job that required that attire. But then engineers aren’t typically known to be fashion plates anyway.
For my current job, I dressed down as far as I ever have for an interview that wasn’t for a job swinging a hammer. Which meant side-zip boots, khakis, and a dress shirt with no tie.
I didn’t expect to get the job. Just goes to show that you never know.
-I know my post was very long. It’s just that I have a lot of experience with the issue and I wanted to share it.
-Well, to each their own. But to answer your question, it’s rather simple. First of all, a ban on jeans or other causal clothes is yet another rule one has to follow. Who would want more restrictions, rather than less? This is a rather arbitrary restriction on nothing less than one’s personal style and, potentially, comfort. Speaking for myself, I want to project a certain image of myself, and being casually dressed is part of it, though as I hinted above, while I still want to be able to wear jeans to work - and in practice still do 70-80% of the time - it’s not quite the dealbreaker for me today that it was a decade and a half ago.
-My criticism of “proper interview attire” applies equally to any rule of etiquette which doesn’t serve a good purpose. While all rules of etiquette may be social constructs, some are more useful to society than others. For example, observing basic rules of personal hygiene and not smelling of BO, not passing gas in public, etc. serves to not to affect others others with things that, viewed objectively, are annoying and unsanitary. Saying “Please” and “Thank you” serve to acknowledge, at least formally, that we appreciate that the person who is doing something for us or giving us something is making an effort or sacrifice on their part. A handshake, while a somewhat arbitrary and culture-specific form of greeting, doesn’t require much of one. But being expected not to wear jeans or other casual clothes to an interview (especially if I will be wearing casual clothes at the workplace afterward anyway) or to a client meeting does nothing to make the world a better place. I am not somehow infringing on the interviewer’s or potential client’s rights or comfort by not dressing up. I can teach English as well in jeans and a T-shirt as I can in dress pants and a button-down shirt. I want to be hired for my skills and experience and not for having presented a fake appearance that doesn’t reflect who I am in real life, and I want, by my example, to encourage employers not to discriminate against candidates on the basis of such artificial and arbitrary standards as the kind of cloth they put on their legs that day. Note that we have done away with many standards of appearance and other rules of etiquette that used to be standard in polite society and the world is no worse for it. For example, we (at least the more progressive of us) no longer frown on men with long hair (something that was a big no-no for much of the 20th century). We no longer expect people whose family members have died to go into mourning and spend a period of time wearing black or other dark colors and avoiding happy social events (in the case of widows, they were once required to do this for a full two years). IMO if a rule of etiquette goes beyond good manners and doesn’t give society any real added value, it should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
-And that is, in fact, what I have been doing. The jobs I have been taking tend to allow jeans and other purely casual clothes. So while I have not been dressing up for the interviews, I have been wearing exactly what I expected to be allowed to wear at the place of work at which I was applying. While my position is that people should not be expected to dress better than usual merely because they are at a job interview, and that they should not be judged for the mere fact that they put casual clothes on for this occasion, I would agree that there is not much point in wearing jeans to an interview in a place where you can reasonably expect to be required to dress up once hired. I myself would not apply to work at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, but if I did have a mind to do so, I would certainly wear a suit and a tie to the interview. Just to clarify, I do recognize an employer’s right to establish a dress code if they so choose. What I’m trying to achieve is for society to move away from arbitrary standards of judging workers by their appearance in hopes that one day, the concept of “appropriate business dress” would be obsolete and that employers would no longer find strict dress codes necessary (I am not referring to things like uniformed jobs, e.g. the police, or jobs that require workwear and safety gear, e.g. construction, merely jobs requiring intellectual work not practically dependent on one’s clothing, e.g. office workers, teachers, account managers, etc.) I hope the day will arrive when two CEOs will have an important meeting to discuss a joint venture and it won’t matter that the one is wearing a three-piece suit and that the other has a mohawk, torn jeans and a safety pin through their nose.
Personally, I like have some degrees of separation between work and personal time. I don’t want to dress or behave at work in the same way I do in my social life. I’ve also been wearing business casual pretty much my entire adult life and am quite comfortable doing so. When I made a presentation to our executives and switching to a dress for your day policy I even told them that I would continue to wear business casual on daily basis because that’s what I’m comfortable with.
I’m just quoting this because I plan on circling back.
You want to project a certain image of yourself which is certainly understandable. But a company’s dress code exists because they wish to project a certain image of their organization.
I think we’ll always have some sort of standards and other than the ones for safety they’re all arbitrary. We’re trending towards more casual these days but at some point in the future it’ll trend to more formal I’m sure.
-Nothing wrong with that if that’s your sort of thing. Not my cup of tea, though [still referring only to the dress aspect - I do behave in some ways differently at work than in my social life; this is a no-brainer example, but some of my best friends are rather, shall I say uncouth types, and at this point in my life I know full well not to use the kind of language at work that we use among ourselves in off hours.]
-I am fully aware of that. My comment about wanting to project a certain image was in answer to your question of why it is important for some people to be allowed to wear jeans to work. I know that many employers want to project a certain image (some actually want to project a casual image rather than a formal one). What I can do is 1) decide if I want to work for an employer who wants to project an image that is at odds with the one I want to project 2) lead by my own example in discouraging such superficialities in society at large (viz. my comments above to the effect that, with a recent exception that doesn’t contradict the rule, I have not only consistently worn jeans to job interviews, but even wore them to a face-to-face meeting with a potential corporate client when I had a business. And this is in part ideological). Not likely to happen anytime soon, but if I ever had a company of my own, the professional image that* I *would want to project is one where employees’ individuality is respected and where the onus is on the added value of the services we provide, not on the superficial visual image of our employees. Not only would my office staff be allowed to dress essentially any way they want (those who wanted to wear jeans and a T-shirt could, but those whose personal style it was to wear a suit could do so as well), but they would explicitly not be required to dress any better when they went to meet clients either (OK, maybe not look like you just rolled out of bed or crawled out from under a bridge). And I would hope that this would not drive away enough clients to bankrupt the company. I would simply not want to do business under other circumstances. This is, of course, speaking only for myself, though again, I hope the day will come when requiring specific business attire will be obsolete even for the purposes of “making a good impression” on clients.
-I’m sure there will always be some standards, but the trend today is to be more tolerant and some industries encourage or even require a more casual appearance (a very interesting example: this summer, before I went abroad again, I went to my local branch of the Royal Bank of Canada, to settle some affairs. The branch had recently been renovated. Prior to the renovation, the tellers were all wearing standard business attire. But on this visit, not only was the standard line counter replaced with separate little workstations beside which the tellers were standing, but every single one was wearing jeans. Maybe a nice top, but otherwise nothing but blue jeans as far as the eye can see. Looks like someone decided that it was time the bank presented itself as being more close to the people or something???). Anyways, you may be right that a time will come when the trend will shift to more formal, but if this happens, I would consider such a trend to be an undoing of progress and hope I will not be alive then. Not only progress, but also reaction, can happen in a society (for a more grave example than the admittedly rather light topic we’re discussing here, there was a time well within living memory where Iran and Afghanistan were actually progressive countries, and not fundamentalist hellholes - see what happened there), but some of us would like to preserve what progress we have made before such backward trends.
I can’t speak for all of the tech industry, but it’s a bit of an exaggeration that you can just show up dressed like Gilfoyle from HBO’s Silicon Valley. A suit may be a bit much, but for my current management job at a Palo Alto tech company, I wore a jacket and dress pants/shirt.
Yessssss. I turned up for the interview dressed the way I wanted to dress for work (no tie, no jacket, m/c boots) and got the job, only to find that they’d given me a pass because I was a college student.
When I told them I’d have to wait a couple of weeks before I could afford to buy business shoes, they issued some company shoes.
This was the same job where, when I got into the elevator, everybody body else pressed back against the wall because I was wearing a tie. which struck me as insane, because my whole function in the company was as a ‘perk’ for my manager. Even the cleaners added more value to the company than I did.
I stuck with the job, because the money was good, but the single worst moment of every day was the moment I put my tie on.
To me a particularly poignant detail in Hidden Figures was that sometimes the job titles would be different for people doing the same job depending on whether they wore skirts or not.
I’ve decided fairly early in life that I wouldn’t ever wear a suit-and-tie. Childish, possibly, but to me the whole thing encompasses a wide gamut of automatic assumptions and symbols and arbitrary traditions that I had and have no interest in taking part in. I don’t like the look, I don’t like the feel of those clothes or shoes, and I feel like I’m doing awkward cosplay whenever I wear one. Not my jam at all. Besides, if a job strictly requires one I’m almost certainly not interested in (or qualified for) that job to begin with, so no big loss. Or, well, pretty much exactly what Maple Leaf is saying.
The one exception I’ve ever made to that rule of living was a live interpreting gig in a heavy duty corporate setting, in which case I did borrow a monkey suit to blend in unobtrusively in the background as is fitting for that particular job. I didn’t like it, but the money was good, but I felt like a sellout and a fraud to my core.
So, yeah, I have gone to job interviews in casual shirts or polo shirts with or without a blazer, in (black, fitting) jeans and discreetly tucked over Doc Martens’. Generally clean-cut and freshly shaved, but no Yer Dad costume (which is itself a distinct look from how I dress in “real life”, which is a kind of grunge-y metalhead-y black-and-skulls-but-mostly-first-thing-on-the-pile type thing).
Got some of those jobs - probably because the tech field in general isn’t too hung up on the penguin look, all the more so when it comes to the basement dwelling IT guys :). In other cases also probably because they *really *don’t care how you dress for remote work positions which, why the hell should they ? They must know we’re all working in our underpants, right ? Got refused for others, but nobody ever told me or even hinted that it was because of the way I looked.
