Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

[PrettySquareGal]

Americans began the 20th century in bustles and bowler hats and ended it in velour sweatsuits and flannel shirts—the most radical shift in dress standards in human history. At the center of this sartorial revolution was business casual, a genre of dress that broke the last bastion of formality—office attire—to redefine the American wardrobe.

https://www.theatlantic.com/busines..._source=vxfb&utm_medium=email&utm_content=pbs

 

[Tiki Tom]

When I started working here, almost all the gentlemen wore suits and ties and the ladies wore skirts or dresses.
Over the years the job has shifted from policy/guidance focus to IT systems-driven workflows.
Ties are a rarity these days and khakis are the norm. (Although I still come in a suit everyday.)
So, yeah, I blame the IT crowd.

 

[Blowtorch]

They do it mostly because they can.
This is due largely to a huge paradigm shift in the rise of the IT profession. The young tech geniuses simply would not adhere to previous standard established code. As a result, to try to appear relevant and hip and with the times, companies generally phased out dress codes and allowed more casual attire.

Suits and ties professionally are now mainly for service workers and salesfolk, if even then

 

[MisterCairo]

So, yeah, I blame the IT crowd.

What's not to like???

 

[LizzieMaine]

When i was in radio twenty and thirty years ago, the only "business clothes" you ever saw were on the sales department. None of us on the creative end of things would have been caught dead "dressing for success," as the saying of the times put it, and we enjoyed snickering at those poor souls who did. The only time I personally ever had to dress in "business wear" was when I moderated news forums in venues where there was a live audience, or when I appeared on television. At this point in my middle-aged thickening I don't even own a suit that fits.

I think it's safe to say that those working in creative fields have always had more leeway when it came to dress. Radio director Arch Oboler was well known, in the 1930s, for showing up to work in a baggy grey sweatshirt, dungarees, and a pork-pie hat pushed back on his head.

 

[BlueTrain]

I actually wore a suit yesterday because there was an after-hours event scheduled for my boss who had just retired two weeks ago. In my eighteen years of working for him, he wore a dark blue suit every day. He even joked about wearing an oxford cloth dress shirt to go jogging in but I think he was kidding us.

But today I'm wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt (not sure which sport, though). Otherwise I still wear a dress shirt and tie.

When topics like this come up, I wonder if, fifty years ago, there were people who bemoaned the fact that women no longer wore proper suits (and hats and white gloves) and men no longer wore tails, meaning a morning coat with striped pants. Things like that are still worn for appropriate occasions in a few places but in this country, they are as rare as powdered wigs. But to say "radical shift" and "sartorial revolution" would be stretching the point. At one time, after all, office workers were the minority among the working class. Everybody else wore "work clothes," even if that meant either a long dress or an old suit with the coat still worn everyday. Only the rich had casual clothes. The rest of us wore "old clothes." That's what we did with our old clothes; we wore them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

William Manchester's description of a typical unemployed worker in 1932 is instructive:

"Since welfare families had often been inadequately clothed before the Crash their rags three winters later sometimes defied description. It was not uncommon to see the head of a family dressed like a vaudeville tramp, wearing a buttonless suit coat out at one elbow, a pair of trousers out at the knee and in the seat, an old summer cap that had hung for years in some furnace room, worn tennis shoes covered by patched rubbers, a pair of mismatched canvas gloves; the whole covered by a filthy old sheepskin."

But hey, he had on a suit coat. So, for that matter, did Frankenstein.

 

[Fading Fast]

When I started on Wall Street in the mid '80s and up through the early '90s everyone from the "runner" in the mailroom to the senior partner wore a tie and dress shirt. Pretty much all the men wore suits and ties, with a few of the modestly paid back office staff (but only a few) wearing dress pants and sport coats.

To be accurate, the quality, of course, varied greatly, but everyone was in business attire. One investment bank I worked or even "frowned on" you if you wore anything but a white or light blue dress shirt. But then in the early '90s casual Friday started in the summer only - in a very controlled way at first. The firm I was at allowed for dress chinos (true tailored cotton dress chinos - not causal Dockers, etc.), shirt, tie and sport coat.

And that held for a few years until it all quickly unraveled in the mid-'90s - more causal days, less restrictions, then, no-ties on Friday in the summer, then, year round, then, polo shirts, etc. It took - really - all of about ten years, but finance went from very uniform suits and ties to where it is today with most firms pretty casual.

While the roots of the change go back to the late '80s, the truly big changes to Wall Street attire all happened in about a ten year span -really amazing when you think about it. In '95, almost everyone was in suits and ties and by 2005 I was at investment banking meeting where, yes, some where still in suit and ties, but some were in jeans and polo shirts (not t-shirts though) and rumpled chinos and open collared shirts were everywhere. A pretty big change in a tight time window.

 

[sheeplady]

Yeah, this is so class based it's sort of irritating.

My grandmother got her first pair of shoes when she was 12 and went to work for an undertaker and his wife as their maid and cook. She was still wearing those shoes when she married my grandfather at 16, and well through the war. My other grandparents were farmers.

I'll say this: a lot of early IT work was dirty and didn't really facilitate good clothes. Crawling around mainframes, connecting networks, etc. was more like being a mechanic than a salesperson. Anyone who's ever crawled under a server farm knows what I am talking about... and those rooms are supposed to be ultra-clean. If you crawl over and under things on a regular basis... you don't tend to wear suits.

Also, and this is a good point too: I've seen a lot of organizations who have significantly tightened their belts as far as utilities. The last institution I was at simply couldn't afford to keep the library air conditioned to 65 when it was hitting over 90 for several weeks in a row. (I also doubt their systems could keep up; it was bad.) Staff were told to dress for the weather and supervisors were told they could not discipline staff for dress. So you saw a lot of librarians in sun dresses and shorts and tanks. Which, to be honest, I don't think we should be wasting energy cooling places to frigid temps just so people can wear suits.

 

[BlueTrain]

When we look back, time becomes compressed. It has been over twenty years since 1995 and twenty years is a long time. But everything else has been changing, too.

So-called corporate casual is somewhat vague just as proper business dress in 1960 was, too, just as you described. Was a white shirt, dress slacks and sport coat or blazer sufficiently dressed up or not? Once upon a time the mailman wore a jacket and a shirt and tie. That's gone. One of my former bosses said that when he worked for a CPA firm, he got sent home once for wearing a blazer and slacks to work. He only wore something that casual when he was taking the afternoon off. He described that as working half a day and only half-dressed.

Some things disappear and you never notice they're gone, too, although you probably wouldn't miss them if you remembered them. Suits are available in lightweight summer fabrics but you won't see them in lighter colors like tan unless you look for them. And I don't think anyone ("regular people," that is) wears a white suit. The lightweight suits are now referred to as "year-round," which means there is no longer a winter-weight suit.

L.L. Bean in his 1940 guidebook to hunting, camping and fishing said to wear your heaviest winter suit when you went up to your hunting camp. We all would here, of course, if we had a hunting camp.

I've mentioned before that I'm the last holdout to wear a necktie, which may not last out the year. The practice of wearing a tie, that is, not the tie itself. Several people here frequently wear polo shirts or t-shirts with company logos and I expect that's a relatively new practice for people other than gas station attendants and service type people who have long worn work uniforms with their name over one pocket, which is usually "Bud."

I don't know anyone who works on Wall Street but when I was little, one of our neighbors worked on the street. He was a street sweeper and his equipment included a broom, a shovel and a big bin on wheels. I think he was a remnant of the day when horses were more common than they were then. Just think of the pollution when there were lots of horses around.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Bean has always been a company that catered primarily to the bourgeoisie. The hunters and outdoorsmen I knew growing up got their stuff at Epstein's or Levinsky's or Kilroy's or the Army-Navy or some other local shop -- or from Sears & Roebuck. As God is my witness, I was born in Maine, grew up in Maine, but I never heard of L. L. Bean until I was an adult in the 1980s, when the "Bean Boot" became a fashion fad.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ Not an argument, just honest comments. I'm never sure I really know what the term bourgeoisie means - even though I'll throw it around now and then myself.

Specific to the above, I grew up in Central Jersey / my dad barely got out of high school / he and my mom grew up dirt poor and never tried to hide it (they didn't lead with it as that becomes its own version of obnoxious, but didn't hide it) / the best way I can frame my upbringing is our house was similar to the family in "The Wonder Years."

We didn't hide anything about our background - Dad half German, half Yankee / mom half German (we think), quarter Russian, quarter Jewish, (again, we think). I was taught what I would call basic manners, but as I only learned later in life, none of the "signal" manners of the upper classes.

Okay, the punch line: growing up, my mom bought our family some things (only a few) from Bean and Lands' End as she thought they offered good value (all our shopping started at that point) for "better things." It was clear that those companies were thought of as higher-end companies (definitely the top of what we bought as most of my clothes came from an early version of a discount store or the Army-Navy store) and those Bean / Lands' End items were "special."

That's it. I don't know what we make of that. I assure you, my mom wasn't trying to impress anyone (just not who she is to her core), but I think she liked getting me (and my dad and herself) a few nicer things here and there.

 

[sheeplady]

My first ever product from LL Bean was a backpack, when I was in the ninth grade. All the rest of mine had busted in a few months and someone told my parents that they made a good backpack. I carried that for five years, until college, when both large compartment zippers busted and I got another. My mother had a pair of LL Bean boots when I was growing up... "Duck Shoes" and I was beyond devastated when they wore out and getting new ones was beyond our means. I wanted my own pair and had hoped to get my mother's hand-me-downs.

LL Bean clothing and shoes, though, was not intended for kids at their price point in my family.

I grew up going to a then-local army and navy store (it's since re-branded itself as an outdoor store and grown) but getting something from there was an expensive treat when, as my father would say, "kmart has clothes and shoes."

I finally got my own pair of duck shoes in 2011. My family also owns several of their grooming kits for travel and two of their sleeping bags. Other than that (and I still have my college backpack) that is what we own that is LL Bean. I don't dispute their quality, but we don't need that much outdoorsy stuff.

 

[BlueTrain]

L.L. Bean used to be a fairly specialized outdoor store. L.L. Bean himself initially resisted the idea of a woman's department. I don't think I'd ever heard of them until fairly recently, meaning maybe twenty years ago. But there's one close enough to actually visit now, maybe fifteen minutes from home.

There's another blog I regularly visit that believes their quality has gone down recently. But then, they believe that about everything. They do recommend a few retailers that will sell you an oxford cloth dress shirt or a woman's print blouse for $175.00. They have their own vision of the Golden Era and as far as I can tell, it was about 1965, when high quality goods were available everywhere at reasonable prices. Only I don't think they had ever heard of Ward's or G.C. Murphy. It's the crowd that's responsible for gentrification, I think.

 

[Fading Fast]

...I grew up going to a then-local army and navy store (it's since re-branded itself as an outdoor store and grown) but getting something from there was an expensive treat when, as my father would say, "kmart has clothes and shoes."....

Funny, the Army-Navy store where I grew up was definitely the cheapest store for certain things as my mom only bought my sneakers and jeans there for that reason. Also, that store would get the occasional special in - a winter coat, or boots or something - and there be a pile of that one item (usually all in the same color and all in one bin or table or area) and everyone would be grabbing in looking for their size as those "specials" offered really good value. I remember getting a fleece-lined jean jacket that way and, I think, a pair of yellowish workbooks (I loved both of those things). It was definitely not an expensive store, although, certain things could be had cheaper elsewhere and we'd get those things at the place that had them the cheapest.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Like I said, growing up in the actual Maine, surrounded by actual Mainers, I never heard of Bean's until it became "fashion trendy" in the '80s. Its marketing prior to then seems to have been focused almost exclusively to an upper middle class/"gentleman hunter-fisherman" crowd -- the kind of people who considered themselves Mainers because they had a subscription to "Down East." Not that they didn't actually wear the stuff out into the woods, but they weren't in any way the kind of people who hunted or fished out of necessity or for a living.

Bean to this day is a bourgeois brand in Maine -- the only Bean most natives buy is the remainders you find at Goodwill with the tags cut out. One particular member of the Bean family is very strongly disliked by most of the natives along the coast, and there's a lot of us who'd rather eat a deep-fried Maine Hunting Shoe than put one more penny in her pocket.

Our local Army Navy store was a place that dealt in what appeared to be genuine military surplus, not the sort of knockoff stuff you get now, and was The Place To Go for camping gear, mosquito netting, work boots, and such things as that. I still have a WWI surplus mess kit and canteen I got there as a kid that saw me thru a lot of summertime activities. The only drawback about the place was the overwhelming musty funk that hit you in the nose as you walked in the door -- you didn't linger long in the place lest you get mildew in your lungs.

For really cheap merchandise there was an operation called "Mohammed's Mountain Bargain Palace," a liquidation outlet set up in an abandoned granite quarry warehouse a couple towns over. This was the most fantastic array of inconceivable goods I ever saw in my life -- it was like someone took every played-out Woolworths in the country, threw them into a planet-sized cocktail shaker, and then spewed the contents out into a totally random mass of scrambled culch, displayed on tables made of old doors and sawhorses. It took nearly an hour to walk from one end of the place to another, and there were things I saw there I never saw anywhere else in my life. Giant pyramids of figurines made of soap that could grow hair. Decorator toilet brushes. Enormous white cotton brassieres with cups that could be used as baby swings. Palletloads of canned soup with labels printed in Hebrew. A bin the size of a small garage filled to the brim with souvenir baseball caps of the Kansas City Athletics. You name any item that nobody could possibly want, and they had a full stock of it. My mother bought me a pair of rhumba pants there when I was about three, with "MEET ME AT THE WORLD'S FAIR" printed in bright red letters across the rump. Now that's style.

 

[sheeplady]

Funny, the Army-Navy store where I grew up was definitely the cheapest store for certain things as my mom only bought my sneakers and jeans there for that reason. Also, that store would get the occasional special in - a winter coat, or boots or something - and there be a pile of that one item (usually all in the same color and all in one bin or table or area) and everyone would be grabbing in looking for their size as those "specials" offered really good value. I remember getting a fleece-lined jean jacket that way and, I think, a pair of yellowish workbooks (I loved both of those things). It was definitely not an expensive store, although, certain things could be had cheaper elsewhere and we'd get those things at the place that had them the cheapest.

I think that when I was young (this was the 1980s) they were starting to transition to more of an "outdoors" store and completed that transition by 2000. They'd carry brands like Columbia in addition to the surplus.

One of my cherished items from there was a Columbia hat... it looked like a turquoise baseball cap made out of water resistant material, with purple fleece lining and fleece ear flaps that tied under the chin. I got it on clearance for $5. Growing up on a farm, we'd often spend 5 or more hours a day outside in cold Adirondack winters. My parents made fun of me for always wearing my hat in the winter and never any of the others we had, until one day my mother's hat got soaked and she wore mine while I was at school. Then she started offering to buy me 2 or 3 hats in trade for mine. I gave it to her when I went to college, and that poor thing survived a decade of heavy farm wear.

 

[BlueTrain]

I would agree that L.L. Bean is bourgeois, although I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. The rich bought their stuff at Abercrombie & Fitch (not the current incarnation of that store, of course). Everybody else bought their stuff at Sears, Wards or J.C. Penney. Army-Navy stores, if there happened to be one nearby, was good for some things but the one in my hometown didn't have hunting and fishing gear, only work clothes and real army surplus. There's not a lot of real surplus around these days but there is a lot of knock-off militaria available.

Bourgeois is what you strive for if you're poor and working class. The people at the top, however, have nearly all the money and power and they are not bourgeois.

 

[vitanola]

Yeah, this is so class based it's sort of irritating.

My grandmother got her first pair of shoes when she was 12 and went to work for an undertaker and his wife as their maid and cook. She was still wearing those shoes when she married my grandfather at 16, and well through the war. My other grandparents were farmers.

I'll say this: a lot of early IT work was dirty and didn't really facilitate good clothes. Crawling around mainframes, connecting networks, etc. was more like being a mechanic than a salesperson. Anyone who's ever crawled under a server farm knows what I am talking about... and those rooms are supposed to be ultra-clean. If you crawl over and under things on a regular basis... you don't tend to wear suits.

Also, and this is a good point too: I've seen a lot of organizations who have significantly tightened their belts as far as utilities. The last institution I was at simply couldn't afford to keep the library air conditioned to 65 when it was hitting over 90 for several weeks in a row. (I also doubt their systems could keep up; it was bad.) Staff were told to dress for the weather and supervisors were told they could not discipline staff for dress. So you saw a lot of librarians in sun dresses and shorts and tanks. Which, to be honest, I don't think we should be wasting energy cooling places to frigid temps just so people can wear suits.

Class based? My paternal grandfather was a mechanic in a shop which built electrical switch boards. He wore a cheap suit to work every day of his life. I think that up this is more the rural-urban divide than it is a class based distinction. The fellow who runs for one independent men's wear shop in our rural town has told me that since the late 1950's every farmer has owned one suit, but unless his size changes dramatically that suit is the one worn at his wedding g or graduation from high school. To this day he sees men bring their 1975 vintage leisure suits in for minor alterations. This phenomenon is not necessarily connected with penury,either. It is rather associated with an utter unconcern for fashion. Not a bad thing, I would think.


Well, back in the 1980s and 1990s I asked that the telecommunications technicians who worked for my firm wear (sport) jackets and ties, although wire pullers could dress more casually. Oddly enough, most of the unskilled workers ended up wearing clip-on ties and cheap sport coats over their work clothes just because they wanted to look like the skilled technicians. I had quite a number of Bell System retirees working for me in technical positions; switchmen, cable men and PBX installers; men who wore blue collar attire in their Bell System days. Most of the preferred to wear jackets and ties becausewhen so dressed they were treated as professionals, rather than menials by our customers.

 

[Fading Fast]

...Bourgeois is what you strive for if you're poor and working class. The people at the top, however, have nearly all the money and power and they are not bourgeois.

I think there was something else going on, at least in my family. I never felt like we were striving or proving anything as a family. My parents were very happy (and always worried about going back) that they were no longer outright poor that the few nicer things they bought were enjoyed but not - at least how I remember it - as a leg up some social ladder as neither of my parents did that in anyway.

All their childhood friends and relatives were the same that they had as adults (with a few additions subtractions as happens). As noted above, nothing about their background was hidden - no new "narrative" was created, etc. They told it straight, but bought a few things (emphasis on few) that were a little nicer. My impression then and now is that was done for the enjoyment of the item itself and not as a social signal.

I think that when I was young (this was the 1980s) they were starting to transition to more of an "outdoors" store and completed that transition by 2000. They'd carry brands like Columbia in addition to the surplus.

One of my cherished items from there was a Columbia hat... it looked like a turquoise baseball cap made out of water resistant material, with purple fleece lining and fleece ear flaps that tied under the chin. I got it on clearance for $5. Growing up on a farm, we'd often spend 5 or more hours a day outside in cold Adirondack winters. My parents made fun of me for always wearing my hat in the winter and never any of the others we had, until one day my mother's hat got soaked and she wore mine while I was at school. Then she started offering to buy me 2 or 3 hats in trade for mine. I gave it to her when I went to college, and that poor thing survived a decade of heavy farm wear.

It's funny how a few items like that when you were a kid really meant something. I loved that aforementioned fleece-lined jean jacket. I thought about getting one this winter until I noticed that it was also a hipster thing and realized I'd look ridiculous. Now I have to wait for the hipster thing to pass so that I can buy one - not that anyone would mistake me for a hipster, I just want to avoid looking stupid enough to try.