You might get a hint of the new urge to take the starch out of business dress when you see the haut couture creations for both men and women paraded up and down the runways at the showings of the fall and spring fashion collections. If that anything-goes look is acceptable, could the dress code for business travelers be heading for a major revision?
Unless you’re blind, acceptable dress in the office and on the road has already loosened a lot—not necessarily beginning with Larry King’s outrageously loud suspenders worn in his CNN studio.
“What works for you may not work for someone else,” according to former fashion model Linda Rice who monitors the shifts in styles. “But with the new self-awareness and new worries about personal image, you’re likely to try to make up your own outfit from the fashion ideas you see on TV and on the Net and in magazines—if you can get away with it at work. You may have noticed there’s now an upswing of interest in tracking male fashions—with a new Men’s Vogue and other reputable publications like GQ and Esquire dispensing savvy advice. But it’s not likely to reach the executive suite.”
“Dress to Impress”
How far can you go violating old standards of business dress without getting in trouble?
Dress-for-success experts provide considerable leeway for office workers and business travelers by saying, “It all depends on the kind of industry you’re in.” If you’re in luxury retailing, nothing could be worse than casual dress, unless the material and style are top-drawer. In the auto industry, with its body-and-fender-shop image, down-market business dress has a certain appeal—in the production area—because it sends a message that there’s “hard work done here,” considerably short of a Nascar team at a pit stop. But auto industry employees in sales should look almost as sleek as the cars they’re promoting.
Among corporate fashion watchers, Florida State University’s Career Center flatly states, “Business casual is an oxymoron.” The center, which coaches job applicants on how to dress for interviews, offers a guide entitled “Dress to Impress: Secrets of Proper Attire.” Its recommendations are as strict as a locker inspection at an Army Officer Candidate School. For instance:
• “The fabric of the suit should be gabardine or wool. Blended material is acceptable but avoid cotton blends as they wrinkle.”
• “Belts should be in good condition and match the color of your shoes.”
A Running Shoes Taboo
Social arbiter Letitia Baldrige, who directs her advice at upper-strata managers, favors always looking your best, which pretty quickly eliminates running shoes with dark-blue business suits. But she lays out many paths to “proper attire” in her best-selling Complete Guide to Executive Manners.
“In a sense, each business has its own dress code, a framework within which an executive can be as creative as he pleases as long as it is appropriate for that business,” she writes. “Someone engaged in handling people’s money, for example, should be carefully, conservatively dressed. Someone engaged in solely creative work can dress for action and comfort, not image.”
“The way a person dresses for work is more formal in some places than in others,” she goes on to say, commenting on longstanding regional differences. “In southern California, Florida and Texas, many businesspeople dress casually, while a place like New York, according to a New York Times reporter, ‘is so subtly attuned to nuances that…a pair of white socks on a man without a tennis racket can put a major crimp in a promising career.’”
How Dignitaries Dress
For authentication of the new informality, just take a look at the way heads of state like to dress these days. With an aplomb that has visual impact, the new political charmer and presidential wannabee—Senator Barack Obama—has been wearing a conspicuously casual open-collar shirt underneath a formal business suit that makes him look like he’s halfway between a speaking engagement and a conversation in your living room. Matching him with a relaxed look—no tie, only tough talk—is Iran’s president with the nearly unpronounceable (until you get the hang of it) name, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nice sartorial partnership!
Students of leadership styles like to hark back to President Kennedy’s breezy look, often because he sailed and took breaks in tieless outfits, and contrast it with President Nixon’s stiff demeanor in full business dress, even when walking on a beach. Russia’s President Putin could be categorized in the same starchy mode, looking as corporate as many CEOs when they’re talking to Wall Street interrogators about their quarterly earnings. Yet President Bush II, a rock-ribbed Republican with conservative tastes, doesn’t hesitate to take off his suit jacket and work a room in shirt-sleeves—a no-no, by the way, in some stuffy law firms when dealing with clients.
Fading Casual Friday
With the sportier look creeping into business dress, you might wonder about the mysterious disappearance of Casual Friday, a fad that surfaced in the early 1990s. It was a good idea when business was more fun—you were in a transitional state of near-euphoria as you prepared to slip into a weekend of diversions devoid of tight scheduling and nagging bosses. Some companies such as Alcoa, Ameritech and Pittsburgh Plate Glass bought into the casual craze, and some of the slouching toward the weekend—with employees intoning “TGIF” (Thank God It’s Friday)—continues to this day, if only as an attitude rather than a faintly rebellious fashion statement promoting sport shirts and jeans.
But Casual Friday has died a natural death, undone by today’s no-frills business environment. There are too many moments now when your last thought is how to be casual. You feel stupid looking like someone about to enjoy a barbecue in the backyard when you’re visiting the boss on a Friday to discuss the lagging sales that might eventually lead to a pink slip.
The Armani Revolution
Even so, casualness is finding some space, however limited, in corporate culture.
It is visibly helping to soften some of the rigidity in business that’s almost militaristic. President Eisenhower perspicaciously called it the “military-industrial establishment.”
But the modification of the dress code—advocates of the casual approach liken it to the “democratization of business” —is happening slowly. That’s because fashion is fundamentally conservative, despite the crazy get-ups you see on fashion pages. (By the time they reach the public at Macy’s, Target or Wal-Mart, the latest style has gone through such pins-and-needle adaptation on mannequins that it often makes the mass-market product look half-old.) The familiar usually trumps the innovative, as one store manager says with astounding insight.
For breakthroughs—that is, casualness defined as freedom to try out new styles—women’s fashions have long turned to the talented creations of the great designers, some with lasting power like Spain’s Balenciaga and his formal look (now experiencing an enormous revival). But as women have risen in the corporate hierarchy, along came the pants suit and conservative colors to match the “boring look” (as freewheeling designers call it) of the corporate male.
For the American businessman, change in dress has come from outside the United States (like most fashion inspirations), and it was Italy’s brilliant Giorgio Armani who reshaped the business suit and liberated the dinner jacket (tuxedo). He almost killed the boxy business suit, Brooks Brothers-style, with his soft-shouldered designs that had comfort as a major goal.
As with almost all aspects of male business dress, the changes had to do with minutia. The peacock, historically the male of the species, continued to leave colorfulness to ladies. Even so, the Armani revolution of the ‘80s and ‘90s is still visible to the clear-eyed in the more informal silhouette he created.
Foreign Influences
What brought the end to the stuffed-shirt look was the favorite engine of change these days—globalization. Suddenly, travelers were visiting locales more exotic than Flint, Michigan or Birmingham.
LONDON - It would be a good actor not to react to a first view of the British male’s dress: strong blue, pink, lavender or other striped shirts accented with expensive ties so patterned and colored that it helps to have shades when looking at them. What happened to the cliché about stiff-upper-lip Englishmen in conservative dress? Not this new breed of corporate managers. On weekends at the country manor house the code is the rumpled look with a wool jacket that looks as though it had been to the cleaners possibly once in the past year. (Brits hate dry cleaning— “it ruins the texture and fibers.”) In any case, the loud shirts and ties have caught on with American executives, and you see them—especially strong blue shirts—among the business guests of TV talking heads.
PAC RIM - Then comes the Pac Rim surprise from Hong Kong to Singapore: T-shirts (and more expensive variants) that are otherwise the cheapo gifts bought by American tourists but—you’ve got to believe it—are acceptable dress in executive offices in the tropics. But Americans never quite catch on to the fact these T-shirts are worn white-laundered, perfectly fit, and smoothly pressed so that they look—gulp—elegant, or at least a bit formal. “Smart casual” is what the Brits call the cooler way of dressing in the hot parts of their empire, in offices, homes and discos. It’s hard to imagine an American executive on a foreign trip fitting comfortably into this regional uniform, especially for an important meeting. In short, a T-shirt, no matter how aristocratically styled, is a T-shirt and definitely informal by American standards. But it does give legitimacy to the trend toward casualness. If you wear a T-shirt under a jacket to the office on a very warm summer’s day, your boss may say, tolerantly, “I gather you don’t have a heavy lunch date with a client.”
AFRICA - But all of that is nothing compared to the band of tropical countries that encircle the globe. There you find frequently underdeveloped countries with a dress code that runs from tribal to tyrannical. Do you show up to meet President Obasanjo, a well-regarded leader of Nigeria, in a shirt and tie? (Major U.S. and other foreign companies have surprising access to top dignitaries in developing countries.) He wears colorful African clothes, with prominent stripes; we would call a costume. You wouldn’t be off the etiquette charts in a business suit, shirt and tie—it’s standard issue to meet a head of government. But Mr. Obasanjo wouldn’t be miffed if you slipped into a light cotton shirt with white cotton pants with nary a tie to wrap around a confining collar.
INDIA - Check out your contacts in India, one of the two burgeoning superpowers, and many of the parliamentarians and corporate VIPs wear Nehru-style shirts and gowns named after the influential prime minister who practically invented the term “Third World.” But if you think you’re pleasing your Indian contact by going around the corner in Delhi or Mumbai and investing in a westernized version of Indian garb, you’re really not. You would just feel foolish not looking businesslike in the American manner.
EUROPE - If the right dress is a compromise between correctness and climate, what’s correct seems to have the upper hand in Europe. The revolution in clothing—most noticeably in Nike and Adidas footwear occasionally worn with a dark blue business suit—that has swept across America has no place in most of Europe. Formality continues to hold sway in most countries, as though banker’s dress were the paradigm of good business manners. It reflects ingrained tradition, the social hierarchy and the cooler temperatures in the north. But the Mediterranean countries from Portugal to Italy make allowances for casual wear because of the spring-through-fall sunny climate. Even so, no one looks more proper—with shirt and tie—than most Italian executives at blue-chip companies. Sylvester Stallone got it right in depicting the Italian persona.
“Always Be Presentable”
“It’s fine dressing down if you can carry it off,” according to Barbara Tuck, who worked with Ford International in Paraguay and other Latin America countries. “But watch out! Customers may not take you seriously if you have even a hint of sloppiness in your dress. You can put outfits together from various pieces—a blue blazer, always acceptable, with pants from cream color to gray or a conservative suit if it’s a woman, accented with one piece of tasteful jewelry. But always be presentable. Am I telling you anything new when I say that?”
“In the casual environment,” Ms. Baldrige advises, “executives should know that if they’re spending two days in another city working on a set where a commercial is being filmed, they don’t have to abandon their jeans, T-shirts, sweaters and running shoes, but if they’re meeting new corporate clients, the men should wear their best tailored suits and the women, dresses with jackets.”
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