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posted by martyb on Friday May 26 2017, @02:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the optional-nerd-glasses dept.

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!!


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  • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday May 26 2017, @10:46PM (2 children)

    by isostatic (365) on Friday May 26 2017, @10:46PM (#516175) Journal

    So, naked?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday May 27 2017, @01:19AM (1 child)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday May 27 2017, @01:19AM (#516226) Homepage Journal

    I've been in it despite never having worked there.

    After some suits from AT&T were distressed, SCO issued a workplace rule that its employees could not be naked between 9 and 5.

    This was the old SCO, that really wrote code, long before they started suing everyone that registered vital signs.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Saturday May 27 2017, @02:34AM

      by kaszz (4211) on Saturday May 27 2017, @02:34AM (#516248) Journal

      It reminds me of this story of another design, though in hardware. But the managerial and sales thinking mindset is all over it. People in that category should be legally required to wear a warning sign.

      Excerpt from IEEE spectrum [ieee.org]:

      The freedom ended
      Although the machine has its flaws, the designers of the Commodore 64 believe they came up with many significant advances because of the freedom they enjoyed during the early stages of the project. The design team was autonomous—they did their own market research, developed their own specifications, and took their baby right up through production. But as soon as the production bugs were worked out and Commodore knew it had a winner, the corporate bureaucracy, which until then had been on the West Coast dealing with the VIC-20 and the Pet computer, moved in.
      "At that point, many marketing groups were coming in to 'help' us," Winterble recalled. "The next product definition was going to be thought up by one group, and another group was to be responsible for getting things into production, and Al's group would do R&D on chips only." "If you let marketing get involved with product definition, you'll never get it done quickly," Yannes said. "And you squander the ability to make something unique, because marketing always wants a product compatible with something else."
      Charpentier summed up their frustration: "When you get many people involved in a project, all you end up doing is justifying yourself. I knew the Commodore 64 was technically as good and as low-cost as any product that could be made at the time, but now I had to listen to marketing people saying, 'It won't sell because it doesn't have this, it can't do that.
      ''The freedom that allowed us to do the C-64 project will probably never exist again in that environment.''