What else is sad is when someone does dress better than their boss, and when you have meetings the people that show up think the employee is the owner.
People have better thing to do with their lives than put up with arbitrary dress codes. Dress clothes are more expensive to buy, harder to take care of and they are less comfortable.
To begin with, a lot more people are doing these things. Even the relatively poor today could, if they prioritized it, visit an expensive steakhouse without making too much of a financial dent. Generations ago, this probably wouldn’t be possible without sacrificing money for medicine, heating, daily food or other essentials. It didn’t used to be normal to work in offices, attend college, go to the bank, shop at department stores, travel long distances, dine out, etc. So when people did these things, they dressed up. Now we see these things as everyday, and so we don’t make as much of a big deal of it. Yesteryear’s cross country flight was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Today’s is just a hassle.
Our clothing habits have changed. All clothing used to be relatively expensive, requiring skilled tailors and pricey raw materials from far-flung places. People tended to have fewer sets of clothes, which they would wear carefully and repair as needed. Today, we tend to want to have many sets of clothes which we wash frequently and rarely repair. And we have developed mass production that has made clothing cheap. A casual, less tailored look is a better match for this paradigm.
Finally, we have the invention of cool and youth culture. Cool requires looking like you don’t care too much. Bankers and lawyers are not cool. Musicians, students and other less-employed people are cool. And these people can wear casual wear.
Because it’s a pain in the ass, takes more time to get ready, and costs more money. I want to roll out of bed, put a shirt on, a pair of pants, slip on some sandals, and be done. No pantyhose, no dresses, no skirts. I refuses to wear any of those items ever again.
My boss dresses nicely, but it doesn’t stop her from wandering around the office barefoot when she feels like it.
Last time I went to a funeral, around 8 years ago, there were plenty of people in suits, including myself. Has this changed?
ETA: I did however wear a brightly colored tie because I didn’t know the black tie rule. If I ever go to another one, I probably still won’t buy a black tie just for the occasion.
My guess is role models. When I was a kid any adult you saw higher than waiter or ditch digger was in a suit. But then we started getting people like Bill Gates who hardly ever wore suits but were looked up to and made billions. When we moved to Silicon Valley 16 years ago we noticed that people here were a lot less dressed up than people in NJ - this is starting to spread.
Also, when people get away with it a lot follow. Today no one at the conference I attend wears a suit to give a paper. When I was General Chair I wore one to give the introductory remarks - no more. Even salesmen don’t wear suits on sales calls any more.
Dressing up takes time, effort and money invested into a persons image. The more they do that, the more they make a statement that they care about themselves. A person who wants to be perceived as a leader and set an example, dresses up. People that are comfortable just being one of the sheep, dresses down. Bill Gates was never the type of guy that would ever dress up. He was a hippie nerd savant who had high intelligence and even though he is very smart he is very ignorant when it comes to style sense.
In my profession, I want people to know I am the boss. I am the leader of the pack. I want them to say “There is the Alpha Male!”
I have always taken pride in my clothing and having it pressed and dry cleaned and making sure it looks great. I shine my shoes a couple times a week.I make sure I groom myself at an exceptional level and smell nice. It makes me feel good and gives me confidence in myself. If I look in the mirror and look like I should be giving a speech in front of thousands, I will feel like a bad ass. I will feel power. Thats the way I look at it. Its all psychological.
I work in a laboratory setting, so Very Nice Clothes are a bad idea. I typically wear jeans and a golf shirt (and steel-toed boots) to work, and even with a lab coat on, my jeans often get dirty. My boss for the past decade or so always wore dress pants, a button-front shirt, and a tie, and it certainly did give him a professional bearing. My new boss is much more casual, and I think I even outdress him on some days.
I hadn’t worn a suit for years and years, until last year when my wife’s boss died, and I suddenly had to attend my first funeral; we rushed out and bought a suit for me. Dressing up is one way people recognize special occasions (even sad ones), and I felt like it would have been rude to show up in ordinary street clothes as if it were just another social gathering.
I feel the same way about going to nice restaurants. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt is fine if you’re going to Chili’s or McDonald’s, but if you’re headed to the kind of restaurant where a team of five waiters simultaneously present the food to everyone at your table, dressing in clothing appropriate to the scene seems like the thing to do; “the food was delicious, and everyone looked nice, too.”
An old mentor of mine always said “Dress the part.”
That is some of the best advice I ever received.
If you are a businessman, dress like the owner of the best company in the world.
If you are a musician, dress like a rockstar.
If you work in the factory and build motorcycles, get some tattoos and wear a cut off t-shirt.
If you owned a motorcyle shop, and a big biker came in and saw you dressed in a suit , you could possibly turn him away.
If you are a businessman on wall street and showed up with a cut off shirt and tattoos, people would not take you seriously and you more than likely would be sent home.
Its all the way you want to be perceived in life. Want to be taken seriously? Dress the part!
If you go to a fine dining establishment, dress the part. Its that simple.
The simple answer is that most western countries used to have a distinct class system in which your mode of dress indicated your place in that system. It worked because the lower classes were so large a piece of the system, and the upper classes controlled the image-making machinery.
WWII broke that class system. The middle class grew to astounding size in the U.S. Their values and their money came to dominate the culture. It took time. The 50s still saw dressing up for most occasions, but the 60s and 70s made a huge rise in leisure time and leisure activities possible by the leap in disposable income and most people started to prefer keeping that leisure dress on a regular basis. Having everybody dress alike was an affirmation of the strength of the middle class. It’s the same force that turned a college degree from a luxury earned by 5% of the population to a mandated standard requiring 60% of the population to attend some college. White collar jobs no longer stood out. They were the norm. You didn’t need to dress up to prove you were special. It’s taken for granted.
Most of us old enough to remember when you had to wear a coat and tie to work every day don’t miss those times at all. Suits are awful: expensive, uncomfortable, hard to maintain, and unflattering on most figures. And then you had to add ties, shoes, dress shirts, and all the paraphernalia that goes with them. Forget it. I’ve worn jeans of some color almost every single day since I left the formal office 22 years ago. The casual culture is as wonderful a part of the new modern world as acceptance for minorities is. You’re not going to get me to go back on either one.
Yep. I’m the boss, so I can dress as I please. My employees don’t care if I’m in jeans every day, and I don’t care too much what they wear. Perhaps we’ve reached a time where people can be judged on more important things.
When I’m in a courtroom, I wear a suit. When I’m at a funeral (and most weddings), I wear a suit. Otherwise, I’m wearing something I can spill on.
While I would certainly agree that the fact role models and captains of industry (Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates) seldom wear suits, which contributes to making the statement that not doing so is o.k., I think the real reason it started to occur is the result of it being a low/no cost concession to improve employee morale. Every business is looking for ways to get employees to do more with less and everyone wants to attract top quality personnel. So, if I want to give my employees a ‘bonus’, that doesn’t cost me as an employer any money, I tell employees they get to dress down, which hopefully gives the impression of a more homey feel to the company, and saves the employee money in dry cleaning costs. Then everyone in the industry starts doing it, so I have to up the ante…
It started off as ‘casual Friday’ where even that meant “wear Dockers and a button down shirt”, which evolved into “jeans and a button down shirt”, which eventually evolved into “just wear clothes that are clean and don’t smell”.
Now carry that forward a while in time, and the management wants to seem more like their workers, so they also dress down. Next thing you know, people are no longer buying suits or nice clothes, and thus, they don’t have nicer clothes to wear when they go out, and their behavior is reinforced by everyone else not dressing up.
I still have to dress up in a suit for work, but that said, I hate dressing up when I go out, even if it is to a nice steakhouse, where I will still wear slacks and a button down shirt or polo, but never a suit. Why? Because a tie will always find it’s way into my food if I’m not careful, and if I stain my polo or button down, it is no big deal and I can launder it at home. If I stain my wool suit jacket, it is a race against time if it is oil based (i.e. every God-damned salad dressing which always makes a break for freedom off the edge of a lettuce sprig on it’s way to my mouth) and I have to go to a dry cleaner. If I forget to treat the stain on a polo, big deal, I throw it out. But a ruined suit jacket means the whole suit is hosed and that’s some serious expense. I actually try to avoid eating salads for lunch during the week when I am dressed in a suit to avoid this problem.
I think exactly the opposite of this. Where I work, I have skills that are valued and I am valued for having those skills. Dressing down says, “look, I am not fucking around here, you are talking to the guy who gets stuff done, and that has nothing to do with whether or not I am wearing a tie”. Leave the “uniform” for insecure people who need propping up.
I have to think this comes from late-90s tech culture, when computer skills became a lot more important all of the sudden, and a generation of college graduates rose rapidly through the ranks without being indoctrinated into “business culture” first.
I would agree that one rarely sees people in suits at restaurants nowadays. But they’re still pretty common at funerals. I was at one just a few years ago and most men were in suits.
Actually, I don’t mind wearing a suit – occasionally. A couple of months ago my wife and I celebrated our anniversary at a very expensive restaurant that is one of the few that still requires men to wear jackets. And I’m talking really expensive – about $100 per person, without drinks.
I’m not going to a fine dining establishment to impress anyone; I’m going to have a fine dining experience. For me that means dressing in something nicer than jeans and a t-shirt, but business casual certainly is enough. There is no “part” unless society decides there is one; and society seems less and less inclined to include suits and fancy dresses in that mix.
[QUOTE=GQELITE33]
A person who wants to be perceived as a leader and set an example, dresses up. People that are comfortable just being one of the sheep, dresses down.
[/quote]
Only in some groups; certainly not in mine. I work in the software engineering world, and my bosses show up in shorts, t-shirts, and sandals. That’s perfectly acceptable, and these guys are technology leaders. They earned their respect by their work, not what they wore to work.
Style is arbitrary and fluid. You seem stuck in the static past. Not to say that I don’t enjoy dressing up from time to time but the rigid rules of the past are no longer accepted as the only way to go.