Business Casual Style

It is a style that consists of a blazer and pant. Usually the pants are of different colour from the blazer. The pant can be jeans, khakis or slacks. The shirt can be a Polo shirt, open-collar blouse or dress shirt.

History of Business Casual

The Business Casual attire did not exist until recently. They used to have only night wear and day wear attire. When the light was out, men used to wear a stroller coat or a morning coat during the working hours and when darkness came, they changed into a tailcoat for dinner and events. When they reached home, they would wear pajamas which usually their spouses would only see them wearing those pajamas. The most casual clothing a man would wear would have been maybe a tweed suit while taking a walk around his area or go for shooting. After the turn of a century, the black tie started appearing and the tuxedo became the more popular one surpassing the white dress code. Business suits became a normal thing and it remained like that for quite awhile.

Aloha Friday Pave The way For Business Casual

Before the year 1996 came, you had casual wear and business attire. Casual wear was worn on the weekends at home, but if you worked in an office, you wore a suit and a tie. There was no debate. Then, a company that made Hawaiian shirts began to strategize how they could increase their profits and a brilliant ad agency in Hawaii came up with the idea of “Aloha Fridays”. They began petitioning local businesses to allow their employees to wear the Hawaiian shirt on Fridays. Initially penned as a way of showing local pride, it ended up quickly becoming a trend and a popular way of avoiding the rat race of corporate America. The fad began to catch on and soon it hopped off the Islands and made its way to the mainland.

Dockers Ad Campaign Brings Khakis To The Office

By the early 1990’s Levis began to notice the trend on the mainland and many of its customers in upper management began complaining that their employees were too casual, wearing shorts and t-shirts to work. The sale of jeans was in decline and so they took it as a chance to market their new brand called ‘Dockers’ to the corporate community. They began to launch expensive ad campaigns for their khaki pants and it took off. Employers looked at it as a fair compromise between shorts and suits and the employees agreed. As this was occurring, television shows like Saved by the Bell and movies about wealthy country clubs began showing the Preppy, Ivy and Trad styles to those outside the Northeastern United States. Companies like Brooks Brothers, Ralph Lauren and J.Crew jumped on the opportunity to increase the sale of their casual wear. They began marketing polo shirts, sport shirts and chinos as perfect options that worked flawlessly or better than the Levi Dockers brand. It was a revolution of sorts.