Business Casual Is Getting Less Casual. What’s It Cost?
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Here's your Money Briefing for Tuesday, October 22nd. I'm Arianna Espudu for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for J.R. Whelan. If you're seeing more blazers and loafers at work instead of sweaters and sneakers, it's not just you. Business casual style is entering a new era, not being casual. And it's coming at a cost.
Buying into any trend incurs a cost. Should you wish to buy into this decasualization trend, the good news is that you're going to get to wear these pieces not only to the office, but also out to dinner on a Saturday night.
We'll hear from journalist Emily Cronin about the way you can buy into the trend without splurging on a whole new wardrobe. That's after the break.
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Business casual at the office has become a lot more formal, especially for women. WSJ contributor Emily Cronin joins me to talk about it.
What change in office dress codes signals business casual is getting less casual?
Emily, tell me about this trend away from business casual. Like, am I ditching my office sneakers? Please don't throw them out yet. I'm sure they're lovely.
But in certain sectors, especially law firms and the financial sector, we're seeing a rebound against the casualization that happened after the work-from-home era when there was a lot of leggings on the bottom, Zoom top. maybe with a blazer on it for the half hour of your call. And those norms filtered back into the office when people began to return a couple days a week, where suddenly in places where it would have only been acceptable to wear a black or navy suit, people were wearing denim and the good sneakers. Now that we're seeing a more widespread return to office directives, What I'm hearing from friends and contacts who do work in these very professional settings is that they've noticed that they need to step it up a bit.
And what does that stepping it up look like? Well, business casual is a bit of a misnomer, and it's actually one of the hardest dress codes to dress to. If you ask any stylist who works with professional women what her number one question is that she gets, it's always going to be, what do I wear on casual Friday? So in a way, people are defaulting to the dressier end of the spectrum approach. almost to make sure that they don't put a foot wrong. So it's full suits. It's wearing heels again. The suit might be olive green instead of navy, but it's still a suit.
There's that famous phrase that I'm thinking about, dress for the job you want. Has that just sort of bounced back and become more true in recent years? Dress for the job you want to keep.
As the job market is becoming more competitive, people are seeing the merit in differentiating themselves positively from their peers by de-casualizing. This is something that I heard from Sally Christensen, the founder and CEO of Argent, which is a workwear brand, that their sales data suggest that women are dressing up for work one step above whatever they were doing before the pandemic. She also acknowledged that this is sector specific insofar as you're seeing people who relax and who say, I'm never going back into heels again.
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