the moment
As businesses lean into their return-to-office era, stylish workwear climbs to the top of the agenda. But this time, it has a distinctly freer feel. Pack away your loungewear and embrace the season’s modern take on power dressing
EVERYTHING I THOUGHT I KNEW ABOUT THE WORLD OF WORK growing up has, much like the rest of adulthood, been proven wrong now I am actually living it. I thought I would be making enough money to buy a house in London by the time I was 25. I thought jobs were won on talent and graft alone (and not luck, connections, chemistry and multifarious other factors). I thought I would have an actual Rolodex, for heaven’s sake.
Laughably, I also assumed that I would set off for work each morning in my grown-up wardrobe of suits and shirts and sculpted shoulder pads (I was born in the Eighties, OK?). A 15-plus-year career in fashion has afforded me many things, but an executive power wardrobe is not one of them – because it’s not necessary. Despite writing the words ‘desk to dancefloor’ countless times over the years – afashion writer’s stock phrase, but not something people ever say in real life – the concept is largely moot. Dress codes are dead: when everything can be desk and dancefloor, it hardly warrants mentioning.
That 9-9 sensibility is not unique to me or my field of work. The idea of a formal working wardrobe can now seem as irrelevant as a BlackBerry. Monday morning at Bank underground station in the City of London is the kind of place you should spot proper executive workwear in the wild. One of the main tributaries into the capital’s corporate culture, if anyone was still casting themselves in the mould of Working Girl’s Tess McGill or American Psycho’s
Patrick Bateman (referring to a fondness for shipshape suits rather than nefarious nocturnal hobbies), they’d be striding through here.
What there is, instead, is a prevalence of workwear-lite: shirts, worn almost exclusively without ties, are tucked into dark denim; blazers are worn over cutesy dresses; polished brogues are usurped by smart trainers. Braces and briefcases? Forget about it.
The pandemic rapidly transformed both the way we work and how it looks. Video-call culture ushered in the era of safe-for-work loungewear. But it wasn’t so much the cause of change as a rapid accelerator. Our working-week wardrobes had long been going through a casualisation: just look at Silicon Valley’s tech bros in their hoodies. Nothing says ‘master of the universe’ like not having to try. (We should have known gorpcore-clad Alexander Skarsgård’s Lukas Matsson was going to ‘win’ Succession the moment he strode off a private jet in bare feet.) British Airways and HSBC are just two of the mainstream corporations that have loosened their dress codes
