Casual

As you can see from this cartoon, the term, casual, is the most widely misunderstood of the dress code terms. When the managers of large corporations, in a somewhat misguided effort to make the work place seem more employee-friendly, decreed that their personnel could wear casual attire on Fridays, they were opening a real Pandora’s Box. The managers had no idea that their employees’ concept of casual was so very different from their own.

Men who had spent their entire careers putting on dark business suits, white dress shirts and ties before going to work, spent their casual time wearing sport coats, button-down shirts, v-neck sweaters and dress slacks. They considered no tie to be casual! The blue-jean craze was something that they did not understand and had not embraced.

When their employees started showing up in the faded, ripped and baggy blue-jeans, that they had salvaged from their college days along with their flip-flops, to wear on casual Friday, the managers were aghast! There have probably been more company memos created and circulated, as a result of this generation-gap misunderstanding of the term ‘casual,’ than for any other more important business item.

Every company has their own version of what it expects and/or will accept as far as business casual is concerned, so I will only attempt to give you the most common guidelines that have been adopted by major corporations.