Among the sea of black gathered outside St Peter’s Basilica for Pope Francis’ funeral on Saturday, one person stood out. US President Donald Trump’s decision to don a blue suit and tie – instead of the customary dark suit that was requested by the Vatican – was considered a faux pas by many.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had been criticised for not wearing a suit when he attended the Oval Office earlier this year, wore all black, which was widely considered more appropriate for a papal funeral.
“Dress signifies not only professionalism but also respect for an occasion or occupation and signals a certain kind of savoir faire,” says Richard Thompson Ford, author of Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History.
For many office workers, deciding which colour suit to wear is no longer a consideration. What was once the uniform of the white-collar worker is now worn by only 7% of employees in the UK, according to a YouGov survey.
The suit and tie has gradually been replaced by more casual attire, with many companies relaxing the rules around what their workers need to wear. Just 4.3% of employers still enforce a strict dress code, according to the HR insights provider Brightmine.
So how did we get to this point and, with office dress codes seemingly going out of fashion, does what we wear for work still matter?
Charles II and the origins of the suit
The origin of the business suit can be traced back to the 17th century and the English King Charles II.
Prior to this, men’s clothes were much flashier, Ford explains, and it was not uncommon for them to wear makeup and powdered wigs. Status was synonymous with extravagance.
After Charles II was restored as monarch, enlightenment values came to the fore. “Men, in particular, were valued for sobriety and rationality so took a more sensible approach to things, including what they wore,” Ford says.
Clothing became more sedate and sober. Charles II was regularly depicted in plain clothes or armour, rather than the more opulent dress associated with the French monarchy. In 1666, he also ordered his courtiers to depart from the French fashions of the time and instead wear a wool jacket, trousers and vest, which would later develop into the three-piece suit.
“People renounced all of the show fineries of the past in favour of something more streamlined and akin to the business suit,” Ford adds. “And that still pertains today, where the business suit immediately signifies a practical, sensible and competent type of leadership.”
1850 to 1950: the first mass-produced suit
For many years, high-status clothing was custom-made and very expensive. This restricted its wearing to a very small elite of gentry and industrialist bosses.
However, this changed in 1849 with mass production. US clothing company Brooks Brothers introduced the first ready-to-wear suit which didn’t require custom tailoring.
This innovation made the suit more affordable, enabling it to be adopted by those outside the highest classes. It quickly became the “default uniform” for people of all incomes, Ford says.
“Everyone from the CEO to the lowliest office clerk was wearing more or less the same costume – a black business suit,” he adds. “Of course, the CEO had a fine, tailored business suit and the clerk had the cheapest, mass-produced one but there was a uniformity that solidified the suit as the modern workwear uniform.”
UK retailer Marks & Spencers introduced its first womenswear line in the 1930s. While this included overalls aimed at housewives, by the 1950s it was increasingly catering to the growing cadre of working women who were taking up clerical and secretarial roles in offices.
Items included wool-crêpe dresses shown in its archives, or clothes made from durable and comfortable double-jersey, which were suitable for both the office and evening occasions.
1960s: the peacock revolution
The post-war movement of women into the workplace continued in the 1960s and accounted for two-thirds of the increase in total employment in the US that decade. Many also successfully worked their way up the corporate ladder, such as Hilda Harding, who became the first female bank manager in the UK in 1958.
Women still faced numerous challenges in the workplace. Equal pay for men and women was not enshrined in UK law until 1970 and a marriage bar, which forced women in certain professions to resign from their jobs upon marrying, remained in place in some areas of the private sector into the 1960s.
But what these professional women wore also became a point of fixation for the press. At the time of Hilda’s appointment as a Barclay’s bank manager, news reports noted that she wore a “velvet-trimmed blue jersey dress and pearls”.
“There was certainly an emulation of men in what women wore and the smart jacket became the female equivalent of the suit,” says Lucy Newton, professor in business history at Henley Business School. “It’s difficult for women to decide what the uniform is when there are so few women in senior positions. The only comparison they can make is with men.”
This meant that the tailored jacket and skirt were popular. “Women had to create their own identity and self-edit,” Newton adds.
Meanwhile, the so-called peacock revolution changed men’s clothing trends. Influenced by celebrities such as Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger, men’s fashion started challenging conventions and breaking down gender norms.
Elements of this crossed into office wear as professional attire became bolder and more colourful, such as the John Draper-esque suit above. Even more conservative office outfits might have included a colourful tie or socks.
1980s: power dressing
One of the staples of 1980s fashion were shoulder pads, which were designed to display confidence. “Women were power dressing to assert themselves in the workplace,” Newton says.
But, while the most senior women sought to express power in the way they dressed, those lower down the corporate ladder still did not enjoy complete freedom. Newton notes that, even in the 1980s, there were rules over what women could wear in the office.
“My office manager once told me women shouldn’t wear trousers,” she says. “While there is a positive side to office dress codes in terms of branding and identity, this shows the negative side of corporate control and telling women what they could or couldn’t wear.”
Men’s shoulder padding also grew wider as the power suit, which was seen as a symbol of ambition and success, was adopted. Corporate dress reflected the serious nature of the professions people worked in, with some suggesting that the pinstriped suits of those in finance and banking were chosen because of their resemblance to the lines on a ledger page.
Elements of 1980s fashion are experiencing a resurgence as part of the ‘corpcore’ trend.
1990s: dress codes get casual
In 1995, IBM – whose employees had a reputation of dressing in copycat dark suits, ties and white shirts – made headlines when it loosened its restrictive dress code. The change was not universally well-received at the time, with one commentator describing it as a “colossal blunder” in the Los Angeles Times.
Casual or dress-down Fridays also soared in popularity. By 1994, half of the 1,000 largest companies in the US, including General Motors, Ford, General Electric, Chrysler and Mobil, observed this weekly workwear ritual.
The origins of the trend have been traced back to 1960s Hawaii, when the Hawaiian Fashion Guild pushed for “Aloha wear” to be considered an acceptable form of business attire. The concept of an “Aloha Friday”, where workers could wear Hawaiian shirts for work, then gradually seeped into US office culture.
Levi Strauss & Co also played a part in making workwear more informal. Its Guide to Casual Businesswear was created in 1992 and aimed to tap into a new business opportunity for the jeans maker.
The pamphlet, which contained photos of professionals combining denim and docker trousers with shirts and jackets, was sent to 25,000 HR departments across the US and helped define a new generation of office dress codes.
2000s: the Silicon Valley influence
The tech workers of Silicon Valley have also had an outsized influence on office sartorial norms. The first wave of Californian tech companies that emerged in the 1970s, such as Microsoft and Oracle, were founded by children of the 1960s counterculture movement, Ford explains.
These new businesses prized creativity and innovation above all else and this was reflected in the informal workwear of these businesses. Hierarchies were flattened, bureaucracy was shunned and dress codes were banished.
In his early years as Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg helped establish the hoodie as the unofficial Silicon Valley uniform. Tech workers from the Bay Area have since been satirised for taking casual workwear to the extreme, often depicted pairing their hoodies with shorts and flip-flops.
This choice of style was partly an attempt to define Silicon Valley against the stuffy suits of Wall Street. In his 2014 book Zero to One PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel said: “Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.”
However, the dressed-down look proved harder to follow for Silicon Valley’s female tech workers. Writing to Fortune in 2016, one Bay Area worker said: “Every day in the summer, when it is 90-plus degrees I wear a skirt to work and am asked why I am so dressed up. I tell the guys I can’t really wear shorts – they wouldn’t be appropriate.
“If I wear a hoodie like the rest of the guys, I’m asked if I am okay because I look tired and I usually dress up more. I have resorted to mostly wearing a black shirt and dark-wash jeans because that’s the thing I will get least criticism on.”
2010s: the Midtown uniform
Silicon Valley’s more informal look eventually transitioned over to the banking and legal services in the US as they also began to relax their dress codes.
Ford says: “In Silicon Valley, wearing a full business suit marked you as unsophisticated and not ‘with it’ in terms of tech and innovation. This caused the dress code requiring a suit to be inverted and it eventually reached the point where you can’t wear a suit and be taken seriously in Silicon Valley.”
Sportswear has also had an influence, according to Ford, as business professionals began pairing suit trousers with trainers or wearing a fleece over their shirt.
“The Patagonia fleece is even described on one Instagram page as the Midtown uniform,” Ford adds. “It’s almost like the old business suit because everyone is wearing exactly the same thing. It’s an informal, unwritten rule but it’s sportswear that’s now evolved into businesswear.”
Women’s workwear continues to follow some elements of men’s fashion, according to Ford, who describes the relationship between the two as a “complicated dance”. He says: “Women adopt aspects of the masculine costume, but they also need to do it in a way that still signifies femininity.”
This could include wearing a blazer with jeans or accessorising with a bag and jewellery, he says. “The distance between masculine and feminine clothing is shrinking and that’s making it somewhat easier for women,” Ford says. But, while it can be easy for a man to wear the same outfit to work that he wore at the weekend, for women this can often be interpreted as too sporty or informal, he adds.
2020s: pandemic and pyjamas
The Covid-19 pandemic shifted workplace norms even further. While office workers were forced to work from home, what people chose to wear became less of a concern – with one-third of people admitting to having worn pajamas while working from home.
With most interactions with clients and colleagues restricted to video calls, what people were wearing below the camera no longer mattered. One in 10 of those polled by YouGov in 2021 said they did not put on any trousers at all for meetings.
While going trouserless has not become the norm, hybrid and homeworking has contributed to a more casual standard of office dress, according to Gearalt Fahy, partner at Womble Bond Dickinson, a law firm.
“Seeing senior individuals and clients wearing hoodies on Teams and Zoom calls in their homes certainly played its part in this transformation,” he adds. “It made casual clothes more acceptable in what are otherwise professional settings. In that sense, the genie was out of the bottle and it seems there’s no going back for many.”
What comes next?
With many companies abandoning their office dress codes, it may seem that we’re entering an era where anything goes in regards to workplace clothing.
Newton says: “We’ve come a long way in terms of corporate dress becoming less bloody important. Ultimately, does it matter the way you look if you do a good job?”
But, while the pandemic may have accelerated the trend towards more casual workwear, our clothing can still reflect our status, role or the industry we work in.
Zuckerberg, for example, has swapped out his hoodies for plain grey t-shirts and, although most people can afford a grey top, his are reportedly custom-made by Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli and cost between $300 and $400. “You can still have a hierarchy in t-shirts,” Ford says. “That has not gone away at all, it’s just become transformed.”
So, while the stiff suits of the 1950s may no longer be popular with office workers, the symbolism of what we choose to wear to work hasn’t disappeared.
