WELL, SUITED?

As attitudes towards dress codes shift, is the suit about to exit our closets?

- AARON KOK

Picture this: you wake up, like you do every morning, and in your ritual of getting ready to leave home for the office, you thumb through your closet rack trying to decide what you want to put on for the day ahead.

You land on a grey suit-perhaps it's still sitting in the same dry-cleaning bag with a receipt dated 2019-the last time it was worn and washed. You stop for a moment, making a mental note that you should try to get it out more often, now that you're part of a growing number of people returning to a five-day week spent in the office.

Yet, you pass over the suit in favour of a cooler, more casual bomber jacket that you can throw over a t-shirt. If that sounds familiar, you're hardly alone.

In this day and age where dress codes continue to get blurrier over time, and the preference for casual-corporate has seen its popularity rocket upwards, the suit often feels more like a fashion relic than an icon of menswear. Once a symbol of power and status, suits now occupy a sartorial territory of something you'd wear to a wedding, a speech or a funeral. Is it time to say a eulogy for the suit as well?

BUSINESS CASUAL? YES PLEASE

The effect that the pandemic has had on us as a whole has been abundantly clear.

Suddenly, the world found itself sitting in front of laptop cameras in their athleisure gear and presenting to their C-suites in boxer shorts. Even as the pandemic became a blip in history, many workers still held on to the new normal of smart casual as the de facto way of dressing for work.

Last September, a YouGov survey reported that a meagre seven percent of workers polled in the United States said that they still don formal business attire when attending to their 9-to-5s-a stark contrast to the 34 percent of respondents who have now transitioned to a wardrobe filled with smart casual separates.