Casual Day Casualties

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The key to mastering the workday casual trend is simply striving for comfort, the copywriters at Dayton Hudson advise. “Try thinking about what you wear to work Monday through Thursday. Now, take a deep breath; let it go. And simply relax your look--a little, not a lot. (Remember, this isn't Saturday.) Just take the edge off. Soften the lines a smidgen. Loosen the ties that bind the tightest. Lighten up the color. See if you can chill out without turning up the air-conditioning.”

Despite this excessively perky corporate campaign, naysayers abound. “Casual day is a hoax and a trap,” Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, tells Levine. “It pretends that on this day we will suspend reading you symbolically. That's not true.” In fact, Levine writes, “instead of simplifying lives, casual dress complicates them. Because casual dress usually applies only to workers with no client meetings or sales calls that day, people have to study their schedules in advance to figure out how to dress.”

Other observers delve even deeper. “Perhaps it's no coincidence that business casual is sweeping the country just as white-collar job security evaporates,” writes Jay Weiser in The New Republic (Feb. 26, 1996). “As companies have gotten more monarchical, all their employees have become sans culottes. The functional and symbolic reasons for distinctive dress have diminished. College-educated workers—the former suit-wearing classes—are now nearly as likely to lose their jobs as blue-collar workers.”

Workday casual, then, is a subtle way to deprofessionalize workers and to remind them, as if they needed any more notice, that they too are expendable.

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