Kensington
Distinguished Member
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2010
- Messages
- 1,277
- Reaction score
- 90
This NYTimes has an interesting piece today about the ubiquity of casual dress among Americans. A number of interesting points are raised, such as manners, self expression, class division, etc. Is it passe to dress nicely? In my experience as much as I've gotten compliments I've also had people ask me why I'm so "dressed up". Once when I was visiting some friends at a very laid back liberal arts school I was even heckled for wearing a tie.
The Casual Couture of the Average American
This family would never have dreamed of traveling in sweatpants and hoodies.Hulton Archive
It wasn’t long ago that we wore suits and dresses on planes, in restaurants or at the theater. Now for many of us, jeans suffice. There are even office-appropriate yoga pants, while tailored sweatpants made an appearance at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week last fall.
As the semi-annual event returns to New York this week, will we see more evidence of a culture that’s taken comfort to the extreme?
The ’60s Changed Everything
Jonathan Walford is the curatorial director of the Fashion History Museum in Cambridge, Ontario, a blogger, and the author of six books, including his most recent, "Sixties Fashion: From Less Is More to Youthquake."
It’s hard to believe when you see pajama-clad shoppers in the cookie aisle and flip-flop clad assistants in the boardroom, that within living memory there used to be rules about wearing ties and hats and gloves and girdles, and white shoes only before Labor Day.
Fashion lost its formal structure in the youth-oriented decade of the 1960s; not surprising considering how difficult it was to frug in a boned-bodice evening gown. The "Fashionatti" -- that elite group of magazine editors, couturiers and socialites that delineate fashion -- had officially lost their power to dictate the use of hats and lengths of hemlines to the youth revolution.
The initial effects of this were positive. Liberated from stuffy tradition, fashion design was reinvigorated at a grassroots level and personal style flourished as a form of self-expression. However, decorum and a sense of occasion began being displaced by a disdain for artificiality and vanity, a desire for comfort, and just plain slovenliness.
Liberated from stuffy tradition, post-’60s style was reinvigorated at a grassroots level. But soon disdain for artificiality and desire for comfort won out.
Fashion anarchy was met with resistance, primarily by hippie hating store owners who posted “No shirt, No shoes, No service” signs, and white-tablecloth restaurants that refused to seat women in trousers and men without ties. But these were specific responses that attacked the symptoms of change and not the cause.
Esquire magazine commented on a “Return to Respectability” in fashion in 1978, and it did seem for a while that there might be a revival of some of the old rules. Men’s hats and women’s gloves didn’t have much of a chance for a comeback, but women were wearing high heels again, and even hats on occasion, and Giorgio Armani made men‘s suits look sexy (at least on Richard Gere.)
However, the children of the boomers, who had been raised in casual wear all their lives, entered the work place in the 1990s and turned casual Fridays into everyday business casual. The final lock on Pandora’s box of "wear what you want" had been opened and now the quest for comfort is mistaken for the pursuit of personal style, while bed clothes are worn on the street and beachwear passes for office attire.
Sartorial Decisions Have Repercussions
Karen J. Pine is a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom as well as a professor in the department of fashion design at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey. She is the author of the forthcoming "Mind What You Wear."
As a Brit I don’t observe American dress on a daily basis. But as I walk around London or board airplanes it is easy to spot our friends from across the pond by their relaxed dress code. A T-shirt, shorts and a fanny pack seem to be the ubiquitous American tourist’s getup.
Should the rest of the world envy Americans' relaxed approach to dressing? Have they discovered how to take informality to a whole new level? Or are they just plain sloppy? Psychological research confirms not only that we are what we wear, but that we become what we wear. Sure, our clothes affect the impression others form of us. People take a nano-second to judge us on first meeting and clothes are a good shortcut. Scruffy clothes scream "can’t be bothered" and power-outfits shout "don’t mess with me." But aside from acting as a nonverbal way of signaling what we are like, how do our clothes affect us, the wearers?
"Enclothed cognition" studies show that putting on clothing that has symbolic meaning, like a white coat, causes us to adopt the characteristics associated with it. So people who put on a lab coat and were told it was a doctor’s coat showed higher levels of attention than people who didn’t put on the coat, or people who were told it was a painter’s coat. Clothing does not just reflect our thoughts and feelings, it can actually change them. So we put on a smart outfit, we feel more confident. We slob around in casual clothes and there’s a risk that our thinking becomes more slovenly too. Smartening up sartorially might just smarten our intellectual senses too.
Free Your Style, Free Your Thoughts
Kris Gale is the vice president of engineering at Yammer, a private social network.
Casual dress has always been the assumption where I work. We’ve got some people with great style, but there’s no pressure on anyone to meet a standard of formality with their clothes.
One of the dictates here is that success requires having the clearest and most complete information, and that formality can often interfere with this. How much time goes into a company making official-looking slide decks instead of immediately communicating its context in a less-formal setting? How often does looking good outweigh being upfront and honest?
Another defense of the casual workplace I've heard is that formality stifles creative thinking because it enforces an idea that there is only one right way to be formal. Creativity requires diversity and free expression. Meanwhile ubiquitous connectivity allows people to work at home, on the road and outside of the 9 to 5 paradigm. If we asked people to wear suits at work, would we ask them to put on a suit when clearing out an email inbox at a coffee shop?
Formal dress puts an emphasis on formality and presentation. But modern business requires information to be rapidly shared with minimal fuss.
I’d personally add that formal business attire can entrench class divisions. I'm careful as an engineering leader to mix in punk rock T-shirts with more traditional looks and I intentionally dress down regularly to show people with backgrounds like mine that they're welcome at all levels of our organization. If you don't grow up ever seeing members of your community wearing suits or expensive clothes, it's easy to see those who wear these things as members of an exclusive group you can't break into. It's not that I don't care about my appearance; it's that I care to send a signal of opportunity and not one of exclusivity.
Clothes Complete the Brand
Troy Alexander is the founder of the Troy Alexander Project, a fashion and lifestyle focused blog.
How you dress is a reflection of your personal brand, something I don't believe our culture emphasizes enough.
What is personal brand? It is the image or impression you want the world to see; how well put together you are, how smart you are and how professional you are. As Christian Dior put it, "Elegance must be the right combination of distinction, naturalness, care and simplicity," but "the most important of all is care. Care in choosing your clothes. Care in wearing them and care in keeping them." So when you dress too casually, what you are saying, in my opinion, is you've lost sight of your brand or maybe you never thought of yourself as having one. Or even worse, that you don't care.
Whether it is for work or on your own time, dressing for the unexpected should be at the forefront of your mind. Think about how many times you have been called into a meeting you weren't expecting or run into an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend. Isn't one of the first things you think after the encounter is "I wish I had been wearing something different"? If we all put thought into not dressing so casually, in really thinking about what message we wanted to send about ourselves, I don't think casual dress would be as appealing. Society may tell us we can dress more casually, but why do we want to? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Casual Dress Has Gone Global
Muireann Carey-Campbell writes two blogs: Bangs and a Bun, about fashion and lifestyle, and Spikes and Heels, which covers exercise.
Four years ago, I wrote Europeans dress better than Americans. From the reaction I got, it's clear that Americans take their casual dressing very seriously.
I argued that American style is just pretty lazy really. No real effort, no flair, all very same-y. There seems to be a bit of a uniform in American dressing; jeans and T-shirts the majority of the time, chinos and a button-down shirt for anything slightly more formal.
As someone who loves style and sees clothing as part of the way I express myself, American style has often left me wondering why more people in the U.S. aren’t willing to experiment with their sartorial choices a bit more.
Over the years though, this casual approach to dressing has gone global. Fast fashion is taking over and people everywhere, from London to Tokyo and anywhere in between, are more concerned with low price points and convenience than quality, fit and style.
When you look good, you feel good and it can quite literally change your day. Making an effort is important. It says a great deal about who you are, whether you like it or not. I don’t buy into the argument that it’s shallow and fickle to care about your style – everyone cares on some level.
You don’t have to be up on all the latest trends, glued to Paris Fashion Week or rocking a ball gown at the office. It’s just about incorporating a bit of flair in your wardrobe – breaking out of the jeans and T-shirt prison of casual madness you inhabit. Go on, try it. You just might like it.
T-Shirts and Jeans: Pure American Style
Vasili Gerogiannis is co-founder of U.S. of Awesome, a T-shirt company that celebrates the American spirit. The company is on Facebook and Twitter.
While casual dressing isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon, certain American traits have amplified the trend. Most markedly, these qualities include our entrepreneurial spirit, individualism and our penchant for comfort.
A key catalyst to the widespread adoption of (business) casual in the workplace was the 1990s technology boom in Silicon Valley. The start-up culture broke the mold in many ways and a clear way to communicate this to the outside world was through casual dress.
America’s love affair with comfort is broad and manifests itself not only in the way we dress, but also in the way we design our homes, furniture, cars and even how we consume our food. While I would argue that a well made suit can fit like a glove and be comfortable, most people prefer baggy clothes and stretchy fabrics.
I believe that comfort and style are not mutually exclusive and I embrace Americans’ desire to be comfortable and seek soft, high quality fabrics, flattering styles and well-designed, patriotic graphics.
There seems to be nostalgia for a time when people dressed less casually. Sure, I enjoy the "Mad Men" and "Downton Abbey" eye candy as much as the next guy, but when it comes to the day-to-day, I think casual is here to stay.
The Casual Couture of the Average American
This family would never have dreamed of traveling in sweatpants and hoodies.Hulton Archive
It wasn’t long ago that we wore suits and dresses on planes, in restaurants or at the theater. Now for many of us, jeans suffice. There are even office-appropriate yoga pants, while tailored sweatpants made an appearance at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week last fall.
As the semi-annual event returns to New York this week, will we see more evidence of a culture that’s taken comfort to the extreme?
The ’60s Changed Everything
Jonathan Walford is the curatorial director of the Fashion History Museum in Cambridge, Ontario, a blogger, and the author of six books, including his most recent, "Sixties Fashion: From Less Is More to Youthquake."
It’s hard to believe when you see pajama-clad shoppers in the cookie aisle and flip-flop clad assistants in the boardroom, that within living memory there used to be rules about wearing ties and hats and gloves and girdles, and white shoes only before Labor Day.
Fashion lost its formal structure in the youth-oriented decade of the 1960s; not surprising considering how difficult it was to frug in a boned-bodice evening gown. The "Fashionatti" -- that elite group of magazine editors, couturiers and socialites that delineate fashion -- had officially lost their power to dictate the use of hats and lengths of hemlines to the youth revolution.
The initial effects of this were positive. Liberated from stuffy tradition, fashion design was reinvigorated at a grassroots level and personal style flourished as a form of self-expression. However, decorum and a sense of occasion began being displaced by a disdain for artificiality and vanity, a desire for comfort, and just plain slovenliness.
Liberated from stuffy tradition, post-’60s style was reinvigorated at a grassroots level. But soon disdain for artificiality and desire for comfort won out.
Fashion anarchy was met with resistance, primarily by hippie hating store owners who posted “No shirt, No shoes, No service” signs, and white-tablecloth restaurants that refused to seat women in trousers and men without ties. But these were specific responses that attacked the symptoms of change and not the cause.
Esquire magazine commented on a “Return to Respectability” in fashion in 1978, and it did seem for a while that there might be a revival of some of the old rules. Men’s hats and women’s gloves didn’t have much of a chance for a comeback, but women were wearing high heels again, and even hats on occasion, and Giorgio Armani made men‘s suits look sexy (at least on Richard Gere.)
However, the children of the boomers, who had been raised in casual wear all their lives, entered the work place in the 1990s and turned casual Fridays into everyday business casual. The final lock on Pandora’s box of "wear what you want" had been opened and now the quest for comfort is mistaken for the pursuit of personal style, while bed clothes are worn on the street and beachwear passes for office attire.
Sartorial Decisions Have Repercussions
Karen J. Pine is a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom as well as a professor in the department of fashion design at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey. She is the author of the forthcoming "Mind What You Wear."
As a Brit I don’t observe American dress on a daily basis. But as I walk around London or board airplanes it is easy to spot our friends from across the pond by their relaxed dress code. A T-shirt, shorts and a fanny pack seem to be the ubiquitous American tourist’s getup.
Should the rest of the world envy Americans' relaxed approach to dressing? Have they discovered how to take informality to a whole new level? Or are they just plain sloppy? Psychological research confirms not only that we are what we wear, but that we become what we wear. Sure, our clothes affect the impression others form of us. People take a nano-second to judge us on first meeting and clothes are a good shortcut. Scruffy clothes scream "can’t be bothered" and power-outfits shout "don’t mess with me." But aside from acting as a nonverbal way of signaling what we are like, how do our clothes affect us, the wearers?
"Enclothed cognition" studies show that putting on clothing that has symbolic meaning, like a white coat, causes us to adopt the characteristics associated with it. So people who put on a lab coat and were told it was a doctor’s coat showed higher levels of attention than people who didn’t put on the coat, or people who were told it was a painter’s coat. Clothing does not just reflect our thoughts and feelings, it can actually change them. So we put on a smart outfit, we feel more confident. We slob around in casual clothes and there’s a risk that our thinking becomes more slovenly too. Smartening up sartorially might just smarten our intellectual senses too.
Free Your Style, Free Your Thoughts
Kris Gale is the vice president of engineering at Yammer, a private social network.
Casual dress has always been the assumption where I work. We’ve got some people with great style, but there’s no pressure on anyone to meet a standard of formality with their clothes.
One of the dictates here is that success requires having the clearest and most complete information, and that formality can often interfere with this. How much time goes into a company making official-looking slide decks instead of immediately communicating its context in a less-formal setting? How often does looking good outweigh being upfront and honest?
Another defense of the casual workplace I've heard is that formality stifles creative thinking because it enforces an idea that there is only one right way to be formal. Creativity requires diversity and free expression. Meanwhile ubiquitous connectivity allows people to work at home, on the road and outside of the 9 to 5 paradigm. If we asked people to wear suits at work, would we ask them to put on a suit when clearing out an email inbox at a coffee shop?
Formal dress puts an emphasis on formality and presentation. But modern business requires information to be rapidly shared with minimal fuss.
I’d personally add that formal business attire can entrench class divisions. I'm careful as an engineering leader to mix in punk rock T-shirts with more traditional looks and I intentionally dress down regularly to show people with backgrounds like mine that they're welcome at all levels of our organization. If you don't grow up ever seeing members of your community wearing suits or expensive clothes, it's easy to see those who wear these things as members of an exclusive group you can't break into. It's not that I don't care about my appearance; it's that I care to send a signal of opportunity and not one of exclusivity.
Clothes Complete the Brand
Troy Alexander is the founder of the Troy Alexander Project, a fashion and lifestyle focused blog.
How you dress is a reflection of your personal brand, something I don't believe our culture emphasizes enough.
What is personal brand? It is the image or impression you want the world to see; how well put together you are, how smart you are and how professional you are. As Christian Dior put it, "Elegance must be the right combination of distinction, naturalness, care and simplicity," but "the most important of all is care. Care in choosing your clothes. Care in wearing them and care in keeping them." So when you dress too casually, what you are saying, in my opinion, is you've lost sight of your brand or maybe you never thought of yourself as having one. Or even worse, that you don't care.
Whether it is for work or on your own time, dressing for the unexpected should be at the forefront of your mind. Think about how many times you have been called into a meeting you weren't expecting or run into an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend. Isn't one of the first things you think after the encounter is "I wish I had been wearing something different"? If we all put thought into not dressing so casually, in really thinking about what message we wanted to send about ourselves, I don't think casual dress would be as appealing. Society may tell us we can dress more casually, but why do we want to? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Casual Dress Has Gone Global
Muireann Carey-Campbell writes two blogs: Bangs and a Bun, about fashion and lifestyle, and Spikes and Heels, which covers exercise.
Four years ago, I wrote Europeans dress better than Americans. From the reaction I got, it's clear that Americans take their casual dressing very seriously.
I argued that American style is just pretty lazy really. No real effort, no flair, all very same-y. There seems to be a bit of a uniform in American dressing; jeans and T-shirts the majority of the time, chinos and a button-down shirt for anything slightly more formal.
As someone who loves style and sees clothing as part of the way I express myself, American style has often left me wondering why more people in the U.S. aren’t willing to experiment with their sartorial choices a bit more.
Over the years though, this casual approach to dressing has gone global. Fast fashion is taking over and people everywhere, from London to Tokyo and anywhere in between, are more concerned with low price points and convenience than quality, fit and style.
When you look good, you feel good and it can quite literally change your day. Making an effort is important. It says a great deal about who you are, whether you like it or not. I don’t buy into the argument that it’s shallow and fickle to care about your style – everyone cares on some level.
You don’t have to be up on all the latest trends, glued to Paris Fashion Week or rocking a ball gown at the office. It’s just about incorporating a bit of flair in your wardrobe – breaking out of the jeans and T-shirt prison of casual madness you inhabit. Go on, try it. You just might like it.
T-Shirts and Jeans: Pure American Style
Vasili Gerogiannis is co-founder of U.S. of Awesome, a T-shirt company that celebrates the American spirit. The company is on Facebook and Twitter.
While casual dressing isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon, certain American traits have amplified the trend. Most markedly, these qualities include our entrepreneurial spirit, individualism and our penchant for comfort.
A key catalyst to the widespread adoption of (business) casual in the workplace was the 1990s technology boom in Silicon Valley. The start-up culture broke the mold in many ways and a clear way to communicate this to the outside world was through casual dress.
America’s love affair with comfort is broad and manifests itself not only in the way we dress, but also in the way we design our homes, furniture, cars and even how we consume our food. While I would argue that a well made suit can fit like a glove and be comfortable, most people prefer baggy clothes and stretchy fabrics.
I believe that comfort and style are not mutually exclusive and I embrace Americans’ desire to be comfortable and seek soft, high quality fabrics, flattering styles and well-designed, patriotic graphics.
There seems to be nostalgia for a time when people dressed less casually. Sure, I enjoy the "Mad Men" and "Downton Abbey" eye candy as much as the next guy, but when it comes to the day-to-day, I think casual is here to stay.
Last edited:
