Office dress codes are a dying breed. And good riddance

2 hours ago 1

Opinion

September 25, 2025 — 1.18pm

What should you wear to work? It’s one of those fraught questions that can weigh heavily on the mind of anyone who begins a new job, or is at the start of their career and has no idea what the usual dress code is.

I don’t blame you for not knowing either, as the way we dress for work has evolved markedly over the last few decades and varies wildly depending on where, how and what you do.

The era of stuffy office suits might, thankfully, be over.

For most of the last century, heading to the office meant dressing up in formal clothing that was reserved especially for working hours. This peaked in the 1980s with power dressing like heavy suits, padded shoulders, boxy briefcases and dangerously high heels (plus dangerously high hair, of course).

Around the turn of the millennium, the rise of the computer age meant the Silicon Valley uniform of jeans and hoodies finally gave us permission to relax the dress code slightly, but only on certain days and in certain industries.

For years, “casual Friday” dictated that office workers could “dress down” by ditching their ties and jackets only on that day.

But the biggest shift to our attire in recent times came from the pandemic years, when anything uncomfortable collected dust in our wardrobes and those who were able worked virtually in the stretchy pants and comfortable shoes.

Have we gone so far down the path of comfort and casual clothing at work that we will soon be back into more formal wear?

A few years on, and we’re now in the era of “inclusive professionalism”, where strict codes have loosened and there is, thankfully, some acknowledgement that work is about your output not your outfit.

When I was in the early stages of my career in my mid-20s, I made a promise to myself that I wanted to be successful without ever having to wear a suit to work. I’ve made it to my mid-40s with that rule still mostly intact.

I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve had to wear a suit to work, and it’s almost exclusively when I make the pilgrimage to Parliament House in Canberra.

The other exceptions were ironic. When I worked for decades in digital media, we enjoyed playing with what we wore. As our usual fashion was extremely casual, we’d occasionally choose to celebrate “corporate Fridays”.

The staff would borrow ill-fitting suits, or glam up with shoulder pads and red lipstick, and we’d sit around uncomfortably – but fashionably – in fabric that could hardly breathe. It was our way of poking fun at office dress codes.

History has shown that what we wear at work will continue to evolve, so what is coming next? For clues, we only need to look at the younger generation.

Gen Z now make up 27 per cent of the working population, and they are still figuring out how to dress at work. One recent, albeit knowing, trend was dressing as an “office siren”. This aesthetic evoked late 1990s and early 2000s corporate attire, like tailored blazers and fitted skirts.

Although it wasn’t a serious mainstream trend, it still caught on in fashion and on social media, and could be interpreted as an early sign that many movements are opposite reactions to what has come before them.

Have we gone so far down the path of comfort and casual clothing at work that we will soon rebound into more formal wear? I doubt it, but you’d better keep those suit jackets or high heels in your wardrobe for a little bit longer. Just in case.

Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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