On “Casual Friday,” let the dresser beware: Anyone who fails to dress down properly violates the rigid offce code that masquerades as informality. Accidentally wear a tie to work and you’ll be treated with all the tolerance accorded conservatives on college campuses.
Every Casual Friday summons forth a herd of independent dressers. But no matter how many people come to work Friday decked out for a barbecue — and quite a lot do, now that two-thirds of companies nationwide have adopted this mandatory casual day — the fact remains that a good dress code, signifying high standards and self-respect,has been replaced with a fraud.
Wearing sports clothes as opposed to the business attire required the rest of the week isn’t casual. It simply substitutes one uniform for another. “So I don’t have to wear stockings, big deal,” says Liz Sarachek, a Dow Jones Global Media sales representative. “To me casual is ripped jeans and a baseball cap.”
John Molloy, author of Dress for Success, says that Casual Friday has been around for more than two decades but took off about five years ago. Businesses that were trimming costs found a “perk for employees that cost nothing.” Many now allow casual dressing five days a week — which fits right in with the pseudo-informality creeping into corporate life. People now answer the phone with just their first names.
But Molloy says the policy isn’t as popular as everyone thinks. Employees must go to great lengths to dress down comme il faut. “You can’t put on what you wear on Saturday. You need a third wardrobe.” Indeed, for all the talk about bringing employees together, dressing down accentuates differences. Molloy says that women executives take pains to dress differently from secretaries; and various types of employees within companies make sure to wear their own distinctive attire. Finding the right casual look is tough.
“The emergence of Casual Fridays has created a fine line of fashion ion dos and don’ts” proclaimed GQ publisher Michael Perlis when the magazine recently kicked off its “Breaking the Code fashion show,” featuring selections from Armani, Donna Karan, and other top designers. There’s now a whole line of ” relaxed” business wear. “Our Pronto Uomo men’s collection [is] perfect for today’s more casual offce dress code,” a full page Nordstrom advertisement in the New York Times proclaimed in December. There are “Fridaywear shirts” from Brooks Brothers and a “relaxed dress shirt” from Joseph Abboud.
How to put it all together? As part of an elaborate marketing campaign, Levi-Strauss has published a “Guide to Casual Businesswear,” which advises: ” Pressed shirts with open collars worn with T-shirts in muted colors are generally acceptable.” And in case that doesn’t explain it, the company has ” casual counselors” available through a toll-free number to sort through the details. “Casual” can be misunderstood, says spokesman Brad Williams. “Some people hear casual and think T-shirts and shorts.”
Dow Jones’s Sarachek knows that casual day isn’t slob day. But she still finds the intricacies of relaxed dressing quite stressful. “Can you wear open- toe sandals? What about a skort?” What about casual skirts? “Who decides what’s too short? Does someone come in and measure the distance between the knee and the skirt? Is there a Casual Friday police?”
Well, sort of: Someone, whether it’s a supervisor, a human resources executive, or an up-and-coming employee, inevitably sets the standard of dress other employees are compelled to emulate. Like any attack on standards, Casual Friday simply substitutes its own rigorous dicta under the guise of breaking rules. This is no different from the adamantly non-judgmental person whose “anything goes” philosophy is itself a value judgment or the literacy critic who says quality is relative and then judges every single work by how it reflects the experiences of women and minorities.
Although the specifics of acceptable casual attire vary from company to company and region to region, they’re enforced quite strictly. When the Rockford, Michigan-based Wolverine World Wide, Inc., maker of Hush Puppies, implemented Casual Friday two years ago, some employees went overboard with T- shirts and sweat shirts. So that employees wouldn’t come to work dressed to wash cars, the company laid down the law. Says Wolverine spokesman Jim Lovejoy, a “memo wouldn’t do it,” because this is the “audiovisual age.” The company produced a video of its own employees in acceptable and unacceptable casual attire.
On Casual Fridays at Dean Witter in New York City, people dress for a golf course, says a female employee. Well, not just any golf course. Shorts aren’t allowed. Although there’s no official policy, workers made a point of wearing collar shirts without insignias. The one exception: Mickey Mouse.
On a recent visit to a New Jersey pharmaceutical company that has an elaborate Casual Friday manual, consultant Robert Goldberg found male and female employees dressed identically. “It was really spooky. Everyone was wearing crew neck sweaters with khakis and braided belts. It looked like one of those coffee houses — the only thing missing was cotton aprons.”
Other companies don’t rely on formal policy-yet are just as strict. When the Chicagoo-based Quaker Oats implemented Casual Friday in 1989, there were no written rules. Employees soon understood what was off limits. But first, workers who crossed the line were “counseled” on the error of their ways. Human resources director Ann Gootee says that they were told, “Jeans are unacceptable.” Khakis aren’t much better.
In other words, it’s impossible for companies not to have a dress code. Casual Friday is a bad one and deserves to give way to the traditional dress code — which doesn’t pretend to be anything that it is no.
Evan Gahr is a New York Post editorial writer.
