After more than a year of working from home, millions of Americans are heading back to the office—and they need new clothes. That offers a rare opportunity to retailers, who are trying to anticipate what their customers will now want to wear to work. Here’s what office dress codes might look like as the country opens back up.
Key Takeaways
1. “Workleisure” has arrived.
Many brands are scaling back their production of suits, adding more stretch to their pants and using new phrases such as “workleisure.” They are turning out yoga pants that look like dress pants, T-shirts you can wear to work and a dressier version of cork-lined sandals dubbed the “Work Birk.” Even Dockers, which helped spawn the concept of business casual, is adding more stretch to its classic chinos. “They look like khakis, but they feel more like sweatpants,” said Nick Rendic, the brand’s global head of design. “The pandemic taught us that we can wear whatever we want, but people still want to look good.”
2. Many traditional expectations are changing.
The shifting nature of workwear also offers new risks for workers in fields ranging from law to finance as they rush this spring to line up new outfits. Some are worried about the social implications of their choices. “If our clients go to a more casual dress code, I don’t want to be that guy in the suit,” said Russ Ferguson, a 37-year-old lawyer in Charlotte who is weighing what to wear when he isn’t in court. More than two-thirds of American consumers plan to change their wardrobe from pre-pandemic styles when they return to the office, according to Klarna Bank AB, a retail bank, payments and shopping service, which surveyed more than 1,000 people in May. Nearly half expect to wear more comfortable clothes, though women are more likely to dress up than men.
3. For some, the expectations feel the same.
Studies have shown that how we dress affects how people perceive us, and that women and minorities are often judged more harshly. Liz Puccetti, a program manager at an industrial automation company, said she expects to dress more casually when she returns to the office this summer. But the 35-year-old, Wauwatosa, Wis., resident will only wear sneakers if senior female colleagues do. “Engineering is historically a men’s field,” she said. “It’s always good to take cues from more senior women in the company as to what they are wearing, because they’ve earned the respect of their peers.”
4. Businesswear will help some put the pandemic behind them.
After a year of anything-goes-attire, a reversion to more formal clothes can help people put the pandemic behind them, according to Omri Gillath, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas. That’s why Sheraz Iftikhar, managing partner of wealth-management firm Arch Global Advisors, reinstated the pre-pandemic dress code of suits and other formal business attire when he brought employees back to the company’s Manhattan office last September. “There was a sense of confusion on their end, so we had to put some guidelines in place,” Mr. Iftikhar said. “We wanted to maintain our culture. We wanted to go back to how things were before the pandemic.”
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The Link LonkJune 07, 2021 at 10:44PM
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How the Office Dress Code Is Changing Post-Covid-19 - The Wall Street Journal
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