Seriously?! I dress for comfort in my casuals, I'll blissfully remain in a 'suspended state of childhood' then as I sail through my 40's and into my 50's.[/QUOTE]
I found an interesting think piece about how we ended up in a place where everyday is " Casual Friday. " It shines some light on the bliss of which you speak.
The counter-culture generation of the late 60s/early 70s. Gen Xers Baby Boomers rebelled against their parents' values and mores through many means, but particular to our purposes consider their dress; out went the suits and ties of their fathers, and on came the tie-dyed t-shirts, baggy cords, modified Army jackets, and in general wild abandon of the Woodstock class. Anyone wearing traditional, conservative garb was clearly a 'square' and not part of the movement.
Fast-forward a decade or so and those same Gen-Xers Baby Boomers are having their own children. What sort of values, stylistically, do they pass to them? For many of us, this is our parents. Did they teach you how to shine shoes properly? How a suit should fit? Did they know their tailor? Or when it was time for you to get your first suit in your youth, did you and your father stand bewildered in a Sears or Mens Wearhouse and your father mumble, "I guess black suits are good."?
The "democratization" of the office from the late eighties to the early nineties. In this time frame the traditional values of a company taking care of its employees, as well as its shareholders, was being rapidly eroded. Pay was declining; benefits shrunk; health care plans slashed. At the same time, companies had to find a way to keep morale up. Why not one day a week where employees didn't require suits in the office? Call it Casual Friday!
Eventually, it became easier to relax the dress code further than offer actual benefits to employees, and so the dress code of Casual Friday became de rigeur every day of the week.
The dot-com boom. IT was rife with examples of casually dressed men who had become million- and billionaires through hard work and inovation. Gates, Jobs, Allen et al opened the door to a class of nerds who didn't have time to dress with all the coding they had to do. Eventually, the expedience of casual dress became a rejection of traditional business rules. This combined with many tech start-ups location in sunny, seasonless Silicon Valley meant that to wear a tie was an affront, to place care in one's dress a rejection of the culture surrounding them. The casual dress code became as strictly enforced as the formal dress codes before it.
