By Bryan Lufkin | 15th July 2021 | BBC

We’ve been drifting away from formal office dress codes for years. The pandemic may have finished them off for good.

If you didn’t buy any new clothes during the pandemic, you’re far from alone.

In the UK, clothing sales plummeted 25% in 2020, the largest annual drop since record-keeping began 23 years ago. The picture was similar in the US, where fashion companies saw a 90% decline in profit in 2020. Particularly hard hit was the business-fashion sector, as workers swapped offices for their homes, in-person meetings for Zoom – and downgraded their outfits accordingly.   

Now, as vaccine rollouts move many countries closer to returning to the office, many of us may be realising it’s time to sideline our athleisure and slip into something a little more presentable.

This realisation might be particularly acute, and indeed unwelcome, for people employed in sectors where formal attire – like business suits, ties and high-heels – is more common. Yet we’ve been drifting away from these kinds of office dress codes for years, and experts believe that the pandemic will have further reduced the need for this kind of attire.

As we transition to the post-pandemic era and its new forms of flexible work, companies may well focus more on functionality – and care even less about staff showing up in formal office wear.

Formality’s rise and fall

It’s abundantly clear that the pandemic has accelerated a long-standing discussion around whether business attire is still relevant. Lockdowns were barely a few weeks old before we began prognosticating about the future of slacks and blazers. By May, we were already debating why the office dress code should never come back, or whether the suit was finally dead.

At first, some experts encouraged us to dress up for work video calls anyway, as it could bolster our mental health and increase our sense of purpose and productivity. (Most of us dropped that pretty quickly, though). Instead, during the past 18 months, most of us have worn what’s comfortable – and the overall consensus is that we’ve been pretty productive, regardless.

That’s a far cry from the idea that to do your best work – and cultivate the best impression – you need to look the part. That kind of thinking dates back to the Victorian era, when professional, educated and wealthy men wore wardrobes of velvet and fur, which signaled status and influence.

Raissa Bretaña, fashion historian and adjunct professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, says that from the 19th Century to the post-war years, tailormade suits were the norm for both working men and men of leisure – and, eventually, women of the same classes. “It was only in the later part of the 20th Century – when dress became more casual and democratic – that the idea of the ‘business suit’ became almost exclusively associated with white collar workwear,” says Bretaña.

Our obsession with business suits peaked sometime in the 1980s, with the rise of the ‘power suit’: the outfit that defined the ‘greed is good decade’ and communicated wealth and power even in pop culture, whether it was the movie Wall Street or the TV series Dynasty. 

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