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 NotSanguine on Friday May 26 2017, @07:57PM
Your thoughts remind me about going to a Windows vs. OS/2 "shoot out" in 1994 or so where IT folks from a bunch of large financial institutions were invited to see presentations from both IBM and Microsoft about their new (Windows NT and OS/2 Warp) offerings.
I (and the colleagues who attended with me) were amused to see that while the Microsoft presentation team donned dark suits and strove to be serious (which is, presumably, how they imagined their audience), the IBM presentation team was in jeans, polos and t-shirts and tried to be "exciting" and dynamic during their presentation.
At the time, we thought it interesting that both Microsoft and IBM were trying to turn perceptions about them (Microsoft as the young, "hip" upstart, and IBM as the staid, venerable "blue-chip" companies) on their heads, as in each case they thought it might improve their standing with the audience.
We didn't care about any of that. We were interested in the technology. But it was quite amusing to watch.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr