You can now wear what you want to work
The pandemic has changed not only how we do our jobs but the clothing we do them in. What price will we pay for this sartorial freedom?
The conservative journalist William F Buckley Jr wrote that the magazine he founded, the National Review, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so”. As a style writer, I’ve spent a lot of time doing the same. Not to say that I approve of men wearing retro or old-timey clothes. “Gent” gear is the worst. What I ramble on about is just the idea that dressing up is good, caring about clothes is good, a little formality in presentation is good. Most men disagree, and are keen to tell you so.
I think men never look better than they do in a good suit and polished shoes. I think the idea that any formality in dress makes for discomfort is a fantasy constructed by slobs who are intimidated by nice clothes. I think a little care in dress shows not snobbery but humbleness and concern for others. I think many straight men’s feigned indifference to clothes is an expression of tiresome sexual insecurity in a world where gender is up for grabs. I think neckties are lovely. I have rattled on about this sort of thing for years.
Well, news flash: the train of history is not stopping, not for William F Buckley Jr, and not for me.
Indeed, the pandemic has caused it to accelerate. The idea that there are certain contexts, work contexts in particular, in which you have to wear one thing and not another is bankrupt. Whenever you go back to work, you will be free to wear any damn thing you want, within the bounds of hygiene and basic decency. Shorts? Only a matter of time, I bet, and the only reason we are not there yet is because most offices are freezing. T-shirt to a meeting? Of course. We’ve been wearing T-shirts to meetings for months, over Zoom. And it was fine.
All the articles written in the past year or two about how, say, Wall Street has gone casual — some of which I wrote, in a mildly humiliating but wildly successful search for clicks — have the same totally accurate comment beneath them. It is that Wall Street already is casual, has been for years, because no one cares, really. The pandemic just formalised the informality.
Why did Covid drive the final nail into the coffin? By way of analogy, think about the agonised debates about how much we will work from home when the pandemic is really and truly over. But the answer, obviously, is that in any job where people have been productive over the past year and a half, we will work mostly from home now. Because people are lazy and companies are greedy. I am massively more productive than I was before the pandemic, because my commute-free day has two more hours in it than it did before, and I spend most of these new hours working. Is my boss going to call up and say, we want you in here, so you can produce less copy? Water cooler conversations, my ass.
Similarly, we have worked in our underwear for months, grudgingly pulling on a T-shirt for video calls, and we all survived. (I unthinkingly answered one work Zoom shirtless, and stayed employed, though my colleague did almost die laughing.) People will not change course and go back to thinking “being presentable” is a requirement.
Francis Fukuyama declared in 1989 that liberal democracy had won and history was over. What we have had since then is three decades of conflict with authoritarians abroad and illiberal nut-jobs at home. I think the lesson was not that Fukuyama was wrong, but that the end of history is painful.
Similarly with the end of office clothes. It will not be the relaxed utopia clothes-haters expect. It used to be that you wore what you did, more or less, because you had to.
Now everything you wear will be your choice, with the result that people read more into each others’ professional work clothes than they did before. Work clothes will come to matter more, not less. There is a reason that kids are happier in schools that require uniforms (though they may deny it) — it’s one less thing to worry about. Freedom will turn out to be a lot of work.