Dress Codes Are So 1965, Unless You Choose Your Own

A 2025 Monster.com survey of 1,300 U.S. workers says that 44% of workers would consider changing jobs if a company’s dress code better aligned with their personal style and preferences—making attire more than just a fashion choice; it’s a retention issue for managers.

Dress codes have always been a reflection of company culture. IBM famously had an unwritten policy that men and women would dress in the company “uniform”: dark grey or conservative suits were mandatory, with exclusively white button-down shirts and dark, subtle ties. Men were expected to be clean-shaven, and women were expected to wear conservative dresses or skirts and blouses.

IBM was in the business of manufacturing precision machines, and the dress code reflected a “cookie-cutter” corporate culture, designed to make employees appear as interchangeable parts of a well-calibrated, orderly machine. It also reflected the conservative mindset of the executives making decisions. If you’re a fan of the Apple TV+ series Severance, you’ve experienced an eerie science fiction concept. The series follows employees at Lumon Industries, a biotechnology corporation, that have undergone “severance”—a procedure that splits a person’s memories between work and their personal life. The dress code at the office was directly inspired by IBM’s dress code.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne launched Apple computers on April 1, 1976. The Apple 1 computer was priced at $666.66. But the joke did not extend to the dress code; even Steve Jobs wore a suit and tie in the early days. Here’s a photo of him in a bow tie.

But back to modern workers. The Monster survey says that while 41% of workers say dressing professionally doesn’t impact their performance, nearly a quarter (23%) believe dressing up makes them feel more confident and focused. Of course, one of the factors in how employees are expected to dress is how much customer contact you have. Establishing rapport with a client starts with the first few seconds. Customers trust people who look like them and look like they represent the product or service. It would be a mistake, for example, to send a general contractor out to estimate a job in a suit and tie and polished wing tips. Professional dress screams “sales” and might even make clients wonder about the contractor’s professional chops.

Retailers are perhaps the last bastion of a formal dress code. They want to make it easy for customers to spot them (red shirts at Target and blue smocks at Walmart) and they want the staff to represent the brand they’re selling. Some brands require wearing, or exclusively styling, clothing from their own collection, such as the 90% black rule at Victoria’s Secret or branded apparel at The North Face; Hermes associates are encouraged to “dress for the occasion”, including styling a signature silk scarf.

Publix, a grocery store chain that’s headquartered in Lakeland, Florida, provides green collared shirts and black pants for its 260,000 people in over 1,400 stores. They have a policy of requiring associates to cover visible tattoos with clothing or makeup, and despite the no-ink dress code, hiring and retention is not a problem. They frequently rank as a top employer in the Southeast, in part due to being employee-owned (it’s the largest employee-owned company in the country) and the strong focus on promoting from within.

Especially for women, what we wear signals mood and approachability as much as it signals our personal style, which can become fatiguing. That’s why many people in business opt for a work uniform of their own choosing. The more you use your executive function during any given day on small issues, the less energy and focus you’ll have for the really important work you need to do.  Call it decision fatigue; the more time you debate what to wear or what to pack for lunch, the harder it will be for you to decide what to work on at the office. That’s why many executives (famously, Steve Jobs and President Obama) wear the same thing to work every day. One less decision, which frees up executive function space for what really matters.