After the Pandemic, the Office Dress Code Should Never Come Back

In theory, the question of what to wear to work shouldn’t pose an unanswerable dilemma. Most workplaces have at least some kind of dress code, and for many of those who greet customers and perform service jobs, a specific uniform is required. Even in the most ambiguous situations, context clues abound on the bodies of colleagues: If no one ever wears jeans, you probably shouldn’t either. But the agita over how to groom yourself for work—hair straight or curly? cover your tattoos or live in the year of our Lord 2020? leggings as pants?—appears to afflict baristas, lawyers, cops, and the denizens of suburban office parks in roughly equal measure.

Much of that confusion is the result of rapid change. Millennials, notorious murderers of American institutions and social norms, are now the largest generation in the country’s workforce. As the oldest members of that group, people in their late 30s, accrue power in their organizations, they’ve started to reshape the meaning of “work clothes” in their image—upending the very idea of a dress code as a single standard to which all should aspire. When they’re done, work clothes might be dead for good. Whether that future looks like a descent into midriff-baring anarchy or a sweet reprieve from the tyranny of binding waistbands probably depends on whether you’re a person who makes rules or one who is subject to them.

Read: Is it weird to wear leggings at work?

In the American imagination, the standard for professional work wear has long been a suit or a conservatively tailored dress, even for workers who don’t go into an office. That’s largely held true despite the successful invasion of “business casual,” jump-started by Dockers as a marketing gambit in 1992. That many of the world’s most profitable companies—Google, Facebook, and Apple among them—allow employees to come to work in jeans and sweatshirts all week has yet to meaningfully destabilize that perception. With that in mind, at the beginning of every new term, Regan Gurung shows up to teach his psychology students at Oregon State University in a full suit and tie.

Gurung is also taking a cue from his own work. According to two studies he conducted, women, at least, are rated by others as more competent when they wear formal attire. And we actually act as though dress influences our abilities: Subjects clad in white lab coats perform better on tests than those without them (though the experiments were conducted with undergrads who didn’t wear lab coats regularly, so it’s hard to tell how enduring the effect would be once the novelty fades). The gap between our internalized notions about professionalism and what a company’s dress code says is why going to work in shorts still causes anxiety that pushes some people onto Reddit and Facebook with their skittish inquiries about what to wear. If a polo shirt is fine, wouldn’t a button-down be even better? If everyone around you at a start-up is wearing ripped jeans, wouldn’t a dress from Ann Taylor stand out in a good way? Is your company’s dress code just a secret test of high-level reasoning skills designed by fiendish bosses?