WSJ Your Money Briefing - Business Casual Is Getting Less Casual. What’s It Cost?

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

More office workers are ditching jeans and sneakers for a blazer and heels. But at what cost? WSJ contributor Emily Cronin joins host Ariana Aspuru to discuss how you can keep up with the new rules for business casual and afford to feel stylish at work. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by CME Group, the world's leading derivatives marketplace, offering the widest range of global benchmark products across all major asset classes. CME Group, where risk meets opportunity. Here's your money briefing for Tuesday, October 22nd. I'm Arianna Espudu for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for J.R. Whelan. If you're seeing more blazers and loafers at work instead of sweaters and sneakers, it's not just you. Business casual style is entering a new era, not being casual, and it's coming at a cost. Buying into any trend incurs a cost. Should you wish to buy into this decadualization trend,

the good news is that you're going to get to wear these pieces not only to the office, but also out to dinner on a Saturday night. We'll hear from journalist Emily Cronin about the way you can buy into the trend without splurging on a whole new wardrobe. That's after the break. AI may be the most important new computer technology ever, but AI needs a lot of processing speed and that gets expensive fast. Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is the single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs.

Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic. Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash wall street, oracle.com slash wall street. oracle.com slash Wall Street. Business casual at the office has become a lot more formal, especially for women. WSJ contributor, Emily Cronin joins me to talk about it. Emily, tell me about this trend away from business casual. Like, am I ditching my office sneakers? Please don't throw them out yet.

I'm sure they're lovely. But in certain sectors, especially law firms, and the financial sector, we're seeing a rebound against the casualization that happened after the work from home era, when there was a lot of like leggings on the bottom, zoom top, maybe with a blazer on it for the half hour of your call. And those norms filtered back into the office when people began to return a couple days a week, where suddenly in places where it would have only been acceptable to wear a black or navy suit, people were wearing denim and the good sneakers. Now that we're seeing a more widespread return to office directives, what I'm hearing from friends

and contacts who do work in these very professional settings is that they've noticed that they need to step it up a bit. And what does that stepping it up look like? Well, business casual is a bit of a misnomer and it's actually one of the hardest dress codes to dress to. If you ask any stylist who works with professional women what her number one question is that she gets,

it's always going to be, what do I wear on Casual Friday? So in a way, people are defaulting to the dressier end of the spectrum, almost to make sure that they don't put a foot wrong. So it's full suits, it's wearing heels again. The suit might be olive green instead of navy, but it's still a suit. There's that famous phrase that I'm thinking about,

dress for the job you want. Has that just sort of bounced back and become more true in recent years? Dress for the job you want to keep. As the job market is becoming more competitive, people are seeing the merit in differentiating themselves positively from their peers by decasualizing.

This is something that I heard from Sally Christensen, the founder and CEO of Argent, which is a workwear brand, that their sales data suggest that women are dressing up for work one step above whatever they were doing before the pandemic. She also acknowledged that this is sector specific in so far as you're seeing people who relaxed and who say, I'm never going back into heels again. Like a lawyer I spoke with who said, sorry, I haven't worn heels since 2020 and I don't intend to. There's another element at play here,

which is tailoring is fashionable now. So whereas in the past, we might've seen people keep a workwear wardrobe and a weekend wardrobe or a downtime wardrobe. A lot of what we're seeing on the high fashion runways is suddenly office appropriate. Interesting. So as we're sort of like the style is becoming a little more, you know, like you said, putting on slacks on the weekends maybe like you're kind of have more of these things in your closet anyways. We're seeing that interest in demand for smart workwear. One statistic that I was really interested to learn in my reporting You kind of have more of these things in your closet anyways? over the same period. So people are curious about this and the newly or recently fashionable nature

of a look that we might have in the past only considered work wear gets part of the credit. In the story, you focus a lot about women in the workplace and how their style sort of evolved. Why is this trend especially pertinent for women? Being a man dressing for work is not as complex, fraught or layered as it is being a woman dressing for work. especially pertinent for women? that there is comfort in returning to these more rigorous codes of dressing. That you don't have to wonder, will I be the only one wearing dark jeans and sneakers today?

You can just say, no, I'm just going to dress to this more heightened level and be prepared for any eventuality. With this move towards more elevated styles comes the desire to go ahead, go to the store and want to spend more money on clothes that are on trend and make you feel a little more put together. How much more can it cost to dress up like this at work? Buying into any trend incurs a cost.

Should you wish to buy into this decadalization trend, the good news is that you're going to get to wear these pieces not only to the office, but also out to dinner on a Saturday night. The power blazers that were part of the story are all incredibly fashionable and would look just as good at a client meeting as they would at a bar or restaurant on a Saturday night.

So the good news is that if you do buy into this trend, it's a trend that will have legs well beyond the boardroom. Are there ways that you can make do with what you have without having to spend money on an entirely new wardrobe? Always, and creatively repurposing pieces that are already in your wardrobe is of course the most sustainable way to approach fashion and trends.

So sometimes it's just a look at the proportions and how you style these pieces. Maybe you have a suit that you were really bored of a few years ago, but you take it out now and you say actually it looks great with the new wide-leg jeans that I got last week, or this trouser is perfect with this body suit that I just got and haven't figured out how to wear yet. It's always a great idea to take pieces that you already have, think about the clothes

that you feel best in, and figure out what are the characteristics of the outfits that already make you feel amazing that may be portable to the clothes that you're not so sure about. So go ahead and do a whole closet assessment before you go ahead and buy a whole new blazer set with those pleated trousers. Absolutely. Have a date with your closet. It's a great way to spend a Tuesday night.

And save some money. And save some money. Absolutely. That's WSJ contributor Emily Cronin. And that's it for your Money Briefing. This episode is produced by Zoe Kolkin with WD editor Chris Zinsley. I'm Marianna Aspuru for the Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.