Does What You Wear to Work Impact the Way You Work?
The summer before my senior year at Princeton, I had an internship with a bank in Philadelphia. My job was to do a market research project to determine how satisfied the bank’s trust customers were. All in all, it was an interesting project and I felt like I did some meaningful work. However, what I remember the most about that summer was not the nature of the work. It was the time I got chastised by a Senior VP for violating the dress code.
During that summer, I wore a suit everyday along with a starched dress shirt and tasteful necktie. On this particular day, early on in my internship, I made a fateful mistake , I wore a pale blue dress shirt. You see the bank required all male employees to wear WHITE dress shirts. In fact, that practice was so inculcated into the culture, that everyone assumed I knew that! Well, I did learn.
During my career have watched businesses move away from a coat and tie culture to a “business casual one. I recall when “business casual first appeared, many businesses really did not know what that meant. One VP that I coached interpreted business casual to mean that it was now OK to wear a bowtie to the office! There was a big fear, that if people started to dress less formally, it would impact the quality of work. I don’t think that was ever the case. In fact, to this day I maintain that I find it a lot easier to think if I am not being strangled by a tie!