08-05-2025
The luxury of dressing down
Remember Dress Down Friday? The idea actually has its roots in Hawaii, where there was a campaign in 1962 by the Fashion Guild to get the Hawaiian shirt accepted as workwear. The plan — known as Operation Liberation — worked, and the government decreed that in the summer men could wear 'aloha attire'. After more lobbying, in 1966 Aloha Friday was born, when men could wear Hawaiian shirts to work in the 50th state on the week's final working day.
The concept spread to the rest of the US under the name Casual Friday. It really took off in the Nineties, when the tech industries were beginning to offer an alternative working culture.
As someone who edited men's lifestyle magazines at that time — Arena and Esquire if you're interested — I was largely exempt from the traditional uniform of suit, shirt and tie. Even so, I still thought a suit with a T-shirt or knit was a good idea — a hangover from the decades when workwear meant formalwear.
But our ideas of work, and what constitutes a workplace, have changed over the past quarter century; so has what is deemed acceptable as a working wardrobe. Today, tech entrepreneurs wear T-shirts to board meetings. And if your office is your kitchen table, then Dress Down Friday, with its implied Dress Up Monday to Thursday, looks quaintly anachronistic.
These days, like many men, I feel pretty free to wear what I want for work, as long as I don't look like a complete scruff. This makes modern workwear fun and interesting, and allows you to express more of your character than when you were required to wear what was effectively a uniform. Think of those Monty Python-esque bowler-hatted, briefcase toting, black-suited businessmen. It's hard to believe they were a male sartorial archetype in the decade that spawned the Sex Pistols.
But unlike punk, today's dress-down workwear is not a rebellious affectation of nostalgie de la boue (literally, nostalgia for mud), but a reflection of the postmodern approach of contemporary fashion designers, in which any style of garment can be appropriated — including chore jackets, fisherman's knits and fabrics such as denim and leather. All are now being offered by luxury brands in high-quality versions to reflect the luxury of being able to dress down. And I, for one, am loving it.
