SYDNEY (dpa) – Sydney computer entrepreneur John Shuttleworth doesn’t wear standard business threads.
“If you turn up in a suit, people don’t take you seriously,” the marketing director of Internet integrator XT3 explained.
But three-year-old XT3 is a corporate rarity these days: a dotcom that didn’t dotbomb.
Many of Shuttleworth’s former clients have shut shop and their luckier employees have moved into mainstream companies where a T- shirt smelling of sweat is not considered a badge of honour.
The April 1999 tech wreck has helped turn sartorial statements on their head with once casual IT executives reaching for the pinstripes when they land jobs in mainstream companies.
A sombre business suit, said Sydney University sociologist Joanne Finkelstein, has always “offered a subliminal message of reliability, saying ‘you can trust this person'”.
In the wash-up of the dotcom debacle, cargo pants and a football jersey can all too easily convey quite the opposite: an unpleasant whiff of impending financial calamity.
With the wind out of the sails of the computer revolution and economies the world over feeling the chill of recession, power dressing is slated to make a comeback.
It already has at the White House, where President George W. Bush has ordered all his aides to wear business suits.
Some American companies have even scrapped dress-down Fridays, insisting that employees wear office uniform five days a week.
While a 1999 survey of 750 companies by the Society for Human Resources Management in the United States found that 42 per cent allowed casual dress every day, there is anecdotal evidence that the tide has turned and the trend is back towards dressing up for work.
Quite a few will be delighted by this about face.
What’s often called “business casual” is rarely a problem for women, who can pick and choose among a wide spectrum of garments they probably already have in their wardrobes.
But for many men, especially older more-senior executives, giving up the business suit was fraught with dangers because there was nothing besides business suits in their wardrobes but ragged jeans and faded T-shirts.
They were forced into the labels their teenage children sported.
The results were often laughable. Says social researcher David Chalke, a partner with Sydney-based Australian Scan: “There’s nothing more bizarre than a hierarchical old-school make trying to look hip and trendy”.
And dressing down is not cheap, either.
Getting decked out in a Pringle polo neck, Ralph Lauren chinos and Calvin Klein loafers costs a lot – and you can’t get by with wearing the same kit every day.
The return to sartorial sobriety ushered in by the tech wreck will be a huge relief to those happy with the old uniform and embarrassed that “business casual” had turned them into figures of fun.
