The End of Casual Friday
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Free Download - How to Ace that Job Interview By Stuart Schneiderman
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I may be getting a little ahead of the curve, but it would surely be a good thing if people in the business world went back to dressing professionally every day.
Observing that business people in London are reverting to more formal attire, Lucy Kellaway comments: “The casual look, which we used to celebrate as a sign of egalitarianism and unstuffiness, now looks sloppy.”
Moreover, sloppy dress might well denote sloppy thought. Or worse. Kellaway explains how casual dress became discredited: “…we also are starting to suspect that a man who is casual with his clothes may be casual with our money.”
As Kellaway says, people adopted casual dress because they thought it was going to fire up their creativity.
Surely, this fetishization of creativity is a vestige of the 1960s counterculture. I suspect that what did in god of creativity was the now-discredited notion of: creative accounting.
Weren’t bankers engaging in the highest level of creativity, creating something out of nothing. Once you unleash human imagination and set it working in the financial world, the sky’s the limit.
The return to more formal dress will, at the least, cure a strange form of cultural dissonance.
The kind that occurred when Mom and Dad were going to work dressed casually, while their children were neatly dressed in school uniforms. To the delight of their parents.
When businesses rebelled against uniforms they were rejecting the militarism from which such dress codes stem. These codes denote position on the status hierarchy and membership in a group. They do not enhance your feelings of being a unique, autonomous individual.
And yet, when we are in trouble, and we need to band together to fight our way through our problems, it is not a time to cultivate the creativity of each and every individual. That has been our cultural policy, and we see where that has ended up.
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