Why are things at work so slow to change?

Power suits, relics of the 19th century, sneakers and the freedom to be ourselves

For a long time now I’ve called Australia’s Gold Coast home. It’s a pretty stunning spot, a sub-tropical paradise flanked by densely forested mountains on one side, and miles of golden beaches on the other. Normally, we have 300 days of sunshine a year. But Australia is also a place of extremes. Australian poet Dorothea Mackellar was not wrong when in 1904, homesick in England, she wrote of Australia as the land of droughts and flooding rains in My Country.

When you live in a place with over 300 days a year of sunshine, just a few days of rain can be enough to blanket everyone’s mood. After what felt like interminable dreary days and a 2022 of seemingly endless rain, the wide open sky that Australia is famous for reappeared in blazing sun-drenched glory last weekend. It was suddenly, shockingly, 27 degrees Celcius and 70% humidity in winter.

And while I was thrilled to feel like I was back living in Queensland rather than the rainy UK, I noticed how many people were talking about what we wear to work. And why relics of 19th-century office attire practices have persisted for so long.

Diversity is top of the agenda in most organisations, diversity of who we are, of how we think, but not, for the most part, in what we wear to the office. That bit, in some industries and many companies has a pervasive, sometimes unwritten rule.

Mostly, we want you to wear the same thing.

Some version of a suit or appropriately suit like attire - tailored trousers, a jacket and neat leather shoes. And only in a bland, neutral palette of “office appropriate” tones.

Wearing a suit or tights on a humid Queensland summer day is a special kind of torture. Walking to the office (even just a few blocks from the car park or train station) in humidity so thick it feels like walking through soup, leaves you drained and cranky before the work day has even begun.

The pandemic has changed the entire landscape around work and its location. And while the subsequent discussion of the direction of things like working from home, four-day work weeks, and the redesign of work continues unabated in the media, a stealth movement appears to be occurring that is drawing much less attention. What we wear to work.

The shift to work from home opened up a whole new range of freedoms for employees, with one of the most loved aspects being freedom over what we could wear. Comfortable, casual clothing became the norm. Even those who were wearing business attire on the top half of their bodies for Zoom meetings soon abandoned the practice as the weeks wore on.

The lounge suit for men, invented in around 1850, was designed to convey messages of success and power. This standard expectation in office jobs continued largely unabated until around 1990, with the introduction of ‘casual Friday’. A movement ensued, with many asking why Friday was different from any other day of the week.

While women have had their own version of the power suit, they have had to contend with a particular expectation of office attire that men have not.