‘Dress-down Friday’ is dead. Long live ‘We’re tracking every keystroke rest-of-your-life’

It’s the end of ‘Dress-down Friday!’ (it says here) Wear what you like every day!

This blah comes from a press release about something or another, I’ve forgotten what, but asserts that working from home means you no longer have to make an effort not to wear a tie on a Friday.

Younger readers – by which I mean anybody under the age of 56 – might be scratching their heads at this point. You are wondering why would anyone need to think about not putting on a tie that they weren’t going to put on in the first place. You are mildly bemused that there was something called ‘dress-down Friday’ of which you’d never heard until it ceased to exist. Did there used to be a ‘dress-up Friday’?

Tl;dr answer: yes. On your way, now. See you here next week.

Stl;dwif answer: aha, now you’re asking, eh? Join me, dear reader, on a brief journey through the serious business of office motivation in the 1980s.

Right up until the late 1970s, office workers from executives to postboy would suit up. For women, this would mean a matching twin-set top and skirt. For men, this meant dark jacket and trousers, possibly a waistcoat and definitely a tie. The popular cultural upheavals of the 50s and 60s just passed by unnoticed as far as offices were concerned. The worst thing inflicted by the 70s was kipper ties and sports jackets, but the dress code remained.

It was only with the blip of punk and its evolution into new wave that things began to change, and the 1980s was an experimental decade for street fashion: largely silly and flamboyant but definitely colourful and comfortable. In the office, this transformed into the cult of ‘smart casual’ which continues to this very day.

Compare earlier pop music fashion to that of the 80s. If you’d turned up at the typing pool in the 1970s attired like Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix, your days in employment would have been numbered. But turning up in the 1980s dressed like David Bowie, Bryan Ferry or Cryssie Hynde meant you were already suitably suited and booted far beyond the ‘smart casual’ minimum requirement.

The one special exception was among men in customer-facing sales positions. Whether you were a car salesman, a media advertising exec or a City broker, you were expected to be in a suit. But rather than be a hinderance, this dress code was extremely popular. The 1980s was the decade of Wall Street, and in many offices men loved to rock up to work shoulder-padded and double-breasted.

I tried this in my first job in the 1980s, borrowing a sharp suit from an old school friend who worked in the City and on whose London townhouse floor I was sleeping at the time. The suit was too big for me. Often you can get away with this kind of thing with discreetly located bulldog clips but there was no escaping a pair of 80s shoulder pads when you’re in a suit two sizes too large. I looked like David Byrne in Stop Making Sense.

The cold-calling advertising sales teams at the magazine publishing house where I worked loved their suits. Ad sales can be tricky department to manage, though: all of them were straight out of college, brash and randy, the women sassy and shouty, the men bullies and thugs. By mid-week, the main sales floor will already have witnessed screaming fits, rage, tears, a sacking, a dumping and at least two thrown punches that connected. By Thursday, the sales pit would be an exhausted, steaming heap of human failure, false expenses claims and festering hormones.

Their bosses realised they needed an trick to keep the cannon fodder motivated another 24 hours until the weekend.

‘Dress-down Friday’ was the original concept. It allowed the Playmobil Gordon Gekkos to turn up in casual wear, thereby making the day feel different and distract them from the infantile inter-colleague arguments that had preyed on their minds all week.

Naturally, few salespeople knew how to dress down, given that they wore their suits all weekend as well: to the nightclub, to the pub, and of course to their backstreet cocaine supplier just like their favourite gangsters in Miami Vice. They would turn up at work on Fridays in top-of-the-range Levi’s with a freshly ironed long-sleeve white shirt tucked in, shiny black Oxfords on their feet as usual.

So the bosses came up with variations on the theme. ‘Wear a silly hat Friday’ was funny but limited. ‘Wear red Friday’ or ‘Demin-only Friday’ must have caught their adolescent imaginations for sure as the same generation, growing up to become parents, went on to inflict this kind of inconvenient bollocks on their (and my) children every time the junior school wanted to run a charity drive.

The one that sticks in mind longest was ‘Lie on the floor Friday’. No-one warned me they were going to try this and it was a surprise to nip down to the pit to deliver some memos, only to see pairs of legs poking out from under each desk and telephone cables stretched to snapping point as the in-house yobs-on-commission continued to try to close that sale before beer o’clock.

Apparently, ‘Dress-down Friday’ has been put to the sword thanks to WFH.

No it hasn’t. There hasn’t been a twin-set/necktie dress-up dress code anywhere since the early 1990s. It’s just the usual blather invented by some social media arse who feels the need to take ownership of something they had nothing to do with by claiming it’s new when it isn’t and saying they discovered it when they haven’t.

OK, there are isolated wormholes-where-time-forgot in which employees must dress up like they used to – royal households, for example – but they hardly count as offices. Besides, can you imagine ‘Wear a sill hat Friday’ at Sandringham? They could wear the helmet from one of the suits of armour, perhaps. Or attend a royal wedding, in which case everyone is wearing a very, very silly hat already.

One stuffy national newspaper on which I worked in the late Noughties insisted that men wore ties, women wore skirts, but this was a recognised abberration and it only applied to the newsroom. This was tiresome for the (perhaps surprisingly) many women who chose to work there but easy enough for the men. My IT colleagues told me to buy a clip-on tie and keep it in my pocket; if I was called to a writer’s desk or needed to walk through the newsroom for whatever reason, I could clip it on for the duration.

One of the support desk guys habitually wore old t-shirts with faded logos and still managed to get around the newsroom dress code by clipping on a tie when responding to a call.

Not so lucky was the casual sub-editor who cycled in to work and hoped he could get away with wearing his lycra shorts all day while donning a white shirt and tie. Sitting at his desk, he’d look just fine and nobody would know, right? The ruse worked right up until the moment he had to go fetch hardcopy from the laser printer. He was not hired for further shifts after that.

The subeditor was simply ahead of his time. His was a trick that I’m told is currently all the rage in the era of WFH video conferencing. But is it really? I’ve read loads of social media wankers claim it so, making the point by posting unlikely selfies while wearing jacket and tie on top and Sports Direct trackkie bottoms lower down.

Oh come on, nobody does that. Nobody except social media wankers, that is.

Self-respecting employers don’t give two hoots what you wear at home, nor in the workplace. Instead, they’re spying on your every keystroke through Microsoft 365, gaining management insights into how long you spend doing every little thing while on company time. What kind of things? You know: checking email, using Teams, posting selfies and inspirational turd-phrases on LinkedIn to boost your social media profile…

And if said social onanist should doubt Microsoft’s ability to determine what’s in the photo, he or she might wish to investigate the company’s latest AI project that automatically captions images based on what it sees in the picture. Great for accessibility, even better for management spying.

MS autocaption:

bookshelf – suit – tie – tracksuit – wanker

If the (wear a silly) hat fits, eh?

ALISTAIR DABBS is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He tries to look smart for online meetings, even when he knows nobody will be enabling their webcams and that he will probably have to crawl under his desk to unplug and replug his USB mic in at least once per meeting. For him, every day is ‘Lie under your desk’ day. More in Something for the Weekend, Sir? every Friday at The Register.