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Americans began the 20th century in bustles and bowler hats and ended it in velour sweatsuits and flannel shirts—the most radical shift in dress standards in human history. At the center of this sartorial revolution was business casual, a genre of dress that broke the last bastion of formality—office attire—to redefine the American wardrobe.
Born in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, business casual consists of khaki pants, sensible shoes, and button-down collared shirts. By the time it was mainstream, in the 1990s, it flummoxed HR managers and employees alike. “Welcome to the confusing world of business casual,” declared a fashion writer for the Chicago Tribune in 1995. With time and some coaching, people caught on. Today, though, the term “business casual” is nearly obsolete for describing the clothing of a workforce that includes many who work from home in yoga pants, put on a clean T-shirt for a Skype meeting, and don’t always go into the office.
The life and impending death of business casual demonstrates broader shifts in American culture and business: Life is less formal; the concept of “going to the office” has fundamentally changed; American companies are now more results-oriented than process-oriented. The way this particular style of fashion originated and faded demonstrates that cultural change results from a tangle of seemingly disparate and ever-evolving sources: technology, consumerism, labor, geography, demographics. Better yet, cultural change can start almost anywhere and by almost anyone—scruffy computer programmers included.
The answer, apparently, is Nerds! NERDS!!
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 26 2017, @04:44PM (1 child)
Did I ask anyone to jump through any hoops? I have no problem with anyone wearing whatever they want. And I completely agree with you about the convenience aspects. I was speaking only to the discomfort expressed in the prior post.
As for myself, I personally don't wear shirt collars that "press" on my throat even when buttoned. The older style detached collar shirts actually didn't press AT all, because the shirts themselves typically had a sort of "crew neck" and the stiff collars would be clasped around them, often leaving a bit of a gap between neck and collar. Attached collared shirts just need to be chosen with the right neck size. As for fit, one doesn't have to have custom tailored clothing to make it comfortable. One can just buy baggier dress clothing. It may not look quite as nice, but you don't have to pay a mint for it. My point was mostly that people who don't "dress up" often frequently have closets full of stuff that doesn't really fit them anymore.
Buttons on sleeves date from a time when "stretchy" materials didn't exist (well, the ones that did wouldn't hold their shape), so if you wanted a sleeve that fit more closely to your arm, you needed a clasp. For cotton or linen shirts or whatever today, they're still helpful, not an "idiotic adornment for no real purpose." (Oh if you're talking about buttons on suit jackets -- I agree with you. They date from a time when jackets too used to sometimes be buttoned at the end of a sleeve, but now they're generally useless and ornamental.)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday May 26 2017, @05:16PM
Yeah, I was talking about the buttons on suit jackets there. But the buttons on long sleeve formal shirts suck too; we invented this stuff called "elastic" a long time ago that should have made those obsolete. My long-sleeve cotton casual shirts don't need buttons; I can easily push up the sleeves any time I want without fumbling with buttons.
As for the collar thing, different people have different neck sizes, so that's why formal shirts have so many different sizes (it multiples the compatibility matrix). With something like a polo shirt, this isn't necessary because the collar doesn't fit near the throat, by design, because there's simply no reason to cover the throat. That's my whole point: why complicate things with an unnecessary requirement that serves no valid purpose? So with polo shirts, you just need sizes S, M, L, XL, and maybe XXL XXXL etc. for the obese people and maybe some special sizes at the big-n-tall store, but the vast majority of people are covered with 4 sizes, all because they don't worry about the neck size by simply having a collar that doesn't cover the throat.