The Robber Barons began the industrial age by building businesses and created great wealth for themselves. Dress codes stem from an effort by the few people in those businesses who benefited financially to separate themselves from the workers.

Wealth was required in order to afford formal dress. The business executives used dress codes as a way of keeping poor people out of management. This discrimination worked until labor unions increased the wages of the workers. The workers were finally able to afford better clothing and more people were able to get into executive offices.

The Dot com businesses of the 1990s proved that dress codes were meaningless. They helped push the larger businesses away from formal dress codes and into business casual.

If the larger businesses had not been violating U.S. laws there would not have been a bubble or a burst. The point here is that the companies with the dress codes created the bubble and the burst, but survived due to their cash reserves. None of this had anything to do with dress codes.

We need to spend less time worrying about what people wear to work and more time worrying about what our top executives are doing.

Women were a great influence in changing the dress codes as well. Women have only worn pants for 60 years and the fear of imposing rules on women have helped to reduce the dress codes in offices.

Take care,
Troy Iuliucci
Men's Fashion Freedom
http://www.mensfashionfreedom.bravehost.com

Jeez, at Uptight University do the best ideas originate with tight shoes?

I've worked at several non-Ivy schools (wink) and have come across many attitudes towards professors' dress. Most of these seem silly.

The guy who wears the suit on the first day of class and then jeans and hockey shirts the rest of the semester believes that he must set the proper tone on the first day.

The guy who wears the tie to teach in the business school thinks that it is proper to do so. Why? because the economics major is part of the business community?

Many people dress up so that they are taken more seriously by 18 year olds.

I understand dress codes at the busines firm. I don't understand why we get uptight about what we wear to teach in.

If you wear jeans and birks to class and the students don't take you seriously, I'd wager that it has more to do with what you are saying than what you are wearing.

If your colleagues don't take your research seriously, then ditto.

If you wear the necktie and you look down your nose at others' more casually dressed research and teaching, then I think you are missing the point about productivity in academics.

Consider this: A better question is how the jeans and birks crowd does when they get fed up with the uptight professors at uptight university and attempt to find a better job. Are there university's out there that value the quality of research and teaching more highly than the superficialities of the dress code?

And I find that my academic colleagues who wear jeans and birkenstocks are not taken seriously at all; I can only imagine how students would respond to shorts and flip-flops.

James touches on one of the under-discussed reasons for the general trend of casual work attire -- fewer meetings to attend. Since I graduated law school (15 years ago), the number of cases that actually go to trial has dropped substantially. So has the number of face-to-face meetings with clients and parties in contractual negotiations. So much is done by electronic communication that I can easily go a week or two at a time without seeing anyone other than co-workers. I agree with Whatever that we need to show respect for our co-workers too, but they don't have quite the same expectations.

How you dress is a sign of the respect you have for yourself as well as the ones around you. You can still be comfortable and casual without looking like you are about to dive into a pool.