Dress-down Friday is all washed up

It's official - wearing casual clothes to work makes people rude, lazy and flirtatious. No wonder bosses are demanding that staff dress up again

Kathryn Hughes

The Observer, Sunday 22 April 2001

Dress-down Friday has not worked out. In fact, it is about to be let go. A slew of new surveys from the States shows employers increasingly concerned that staff who turn up in 'smart casual' (or should that be 'casual smart'?) are up to 50 per cent more likely to act rude and silly.

Lateness, sluggishness or just not being there at all have all become hallmarks of the last day of the working week, according to a study for American Corporate Trends Magazine. So much so, that many bosses are now returning Friday to its previous strict and sober incarnation. They include George W. Bush, who has decreed that henceforth all White House staff must be formally suited and booted whenever they report for work. And in Britain the Institute of Directors has also detected signs of an end to the recent custom of greeting the weekend one day early with a sludgy medley of soft trousers and endless, endless fleeces.

Friday first went casual in Britain in the late 1980s, but the practice didn't really catch fire until the mid-Nineties. By then, the economy was booming and new sources of income and prestige - IT, biotechnology, dotcom - were emerging. The people who worked for these firms may have been rich (in fact, they were getting richer all the time), but they liked to think that they were sufficiently self-confident not to need to rely on someone else's idea of a status symbol. Bowler hats and umbrellas represented an older - now ailing - economy, one that had been founded aeons ago in the mid-nineteenth century on a formal distinction between work and home.

The New Economy, by contrast, liked to emphasise the continuity and even overlap between professional and domestic spaces. People brought scented candles to the office before returning home to a converted industrial site. In Frankfurt, workers could pop into 'nap rooms' after lunch, while in London the smartest new nightclub was called, quite simply, 'Home'. At the level of aesthetics, work and play had become infinitely swappable.

By the time the Millennium finally arrived, many firms, including the formerly pinstriped Merrill Lynch and Arthur Andersen, had decided to extend dress-down Friday to the other four days of the week. There were rules, of course - there always are. No jeans, naturally, and some other less obvious demarcations: shirts needed to have collars, and shoes laces. In America, apparently, staff had to be reminded to wear underwear, but that never seems to have been a problem in EC4 where it is always rather cold.

What has been a problem, though, for a lot of people is achieving the required look. 'I can never remember if I'm supposed to be going for smart casual or casual smart,' complains one Merrill Lynch employee, who has given up pondering the distinction and taken refuge in ubiquitous chinos. While American and French men have long had an alternative uniform to the business suit - polo shirt, unstructured jacket, brownish/fawn trousers - British men have mostly had to resort to that odd solution of teaming a formal, usually Harris tweed, jacket with jeans.

Several retailers have taken pity on the hordes of baffled men who arrive for work in the financial institutions of Canary Wharf each day knowing that they don't want to dress like Jeremy Clarkson but aren't quite sure who they do want to look like. Both Gap and Ted Baker have set up branches stuffed full of the kind of touchy-feely clobber that will take you inconspicuously through the day in a symphony of mushroom.

What is odd is the complaint by one third of employers polled in New York last year that dress-down Friday has led to a huge increase in flirtatiousness among their staff. There surely can be nothing less erotic than men and women swaddled alike in baggy fleeces and comfy cords. 'I sometimes feel as if I'm working in an office staffed by expensive teddy bears,' reports one female bank worker who looks back with fondness to the days of crisp suiting. She's right, of course.

Formal business wear is designed to give the illusion of sharp lines where none really exist. Waists are clinched, shoulders padded, large bottoms mercifully covered. In the case of men, the tie points urgently towards the genital area while, with women, obligatory skirts mean that legs are always on show. It's no surprise that a recent survey of more than 2,000 office workers carried out for Mills & Boon showed that a third of us, male and female, like to fantasise about the object of our office affections wearing a nice smart suit.

Dressing down has proved to be more of a worry, than getting decked out in a uniform ever was. Even in those companies that are casual every day, the understanding is that you wear a suit whenever appropriate - to meet a client, make an important presentation.

'As a result I spend more time matching up my clothes to my schedule than I ever did before,' says Sarah Smart, who works for a Swiss bank.

And, if America is anything to go by, the sartorial week is about to get even more complicated. To counter the negative effects of dress-down Fridays, some firms have instituted the weird corrective of Dress Up Thursdays. Soon, it seems, each day of the week could carry its own coercive dress code.

Where dress-down Friday got it wrong was not in overestimating the importance of clothing upon our psyches, but in underplaying it. Employers had the vague hope that allowing people to wear buff-coloured trousers to the office would signal a loosening up of mental boundaries which, in turn, would release a stream of 'beyond the box' thinking.

But clothing acts like a sharp trigger for sense memory. Wear casual clothes to work, and your brain thinks it's on holiday. It doesn't want to come up with left-field solutions to the problems in Product Development. Instead it makes you want to gossip with your friends, drink coffee, send loads of raffish emails and, if you can bear to fumble through all those layers of fleece, have sex with the person sitting next to you.

Asking people to pretend that work is fun, and then suggesting that they mark this state of affairs by wearing combat trousers, is the height of patronisation. As the economy slows down and recession begins to bite, these kinds of self-deceiving strategies are beginning to fall away. We know what work owes us - money, skills-training and a certain amount of status. It doesn't own our souls, and we wouldn't want it to. For that we have home, where we can dress exactly as we please.

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