More Firms Giving Workers a Dressing-Down They Like

Dressing down in the workplace is not just for Fridays anymore. And it’s not just for Internet start-ups.

The trend toward casual wear in the workplace that started at hip Silicon Valley firms more than a decade ago is transforming the last citadels of formality: Law firms and brokerage houses from Boston to Los Angeles are replacing centuries-old dress codes with policies that allow employees to abandon pinstripes and high heels for khakis and loafers--every day.

The changes mark a social revolution in attitudes toward hierarchy and decorum and illustrate how the values of the Internet economy are helping rewrite the rules of the American workplace.

Most high-tech companies have long eschewed dress codes, and many employees wear tie-dyes, jeans and sandals. Executives of stodgier corporations are only now following suit as they attempt to land these firms as clients and prevent their own employees from defecting to less regimented workplaces.

“We cannot attract the best minds with a formal dress code,” Philip J. Purcell, chairman of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Inc., told shareholders at the brokerage’s annual meeting this month.

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., J.P. Morgan & Co. and other Wall Street brokerages announced they would conform to their clients’ more casual dress.

And Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the venerable New York law firm that since 1792 has required its young associates and law partners to wear strict business attire, said it now will allow employees to dress down 365 days a year.

“This is a reflection of the new way in which business is done,” said Mitchell Sonkin, a partner at Cadwalader. “People are no longer impressed by how you dress. [Casual clothes] break down barriers and make for happier and more productive people in the workplace.”

The trend has quietly mushroomed in offices across the nation. Now 42% of employers have a casual dress policy every day, according to the Society of Human Resource Management in Washington.

Casual dress generally means that employees can ditch their business suits, skirts and blazer or mid-length dress for khakis, sport shirts and sweaters. Many employers still prohibit jeans, spandex, halter tops, leggings, sneakers and sandals.

The explosion of casual dress is part of the “casualization of America,” said Sherry Maysonave, author of “Casual Power: How to Power Up Your Nonverbal Communication and Dress Down for Success.”

The trend, she said, has become a necessity in the Internet era. “Because people have so little time, they need to connect at a personal level quicker,” said Maysonave, who was recently retained by consulting giant Arthur Andersen to develop a casual-dress policy.

“This casualization is more efficient: Information needs to be passed on more quickly, so the formalities fall by the wayside,” she said.

The relaxed dress rules mean that heaps of Ralph Lauren, Bill Blass and Hugo Boss suits are ending up in donation bins.

One career counseling agency has collected hundreds of suits and ties from firms such as Cadwalader and given them to welfare recipients, disabled people and former prison inmates preparing for the working world. But even for these people, the designer gear has limited utility. At their new jobs, almost everyone is dressed casually, so they must hang up their suits after the first week.

The move toward relaxed dress codes is but one example of how the Internet economy is giving the American office a make-over. At some Silicon Valley companies, cubicle dwellers have sofas in their work spaces, employees bring their pets to work, and bosses even supply computer games, on-site massages and cappuccino bars.

And increasingly, the professional firms that service these high-tech outfits are looking and acting more like their clients. Many law and consulting firms have abolished their hierarchical structure, adopting clients’ teamwork approach and even some of their quirky perks. The result, experts say, has been a democratizing of tradition-bound firms.

Take Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, the San Francisco-based law firm of 700 attorneys that represents Cisco Systems Inc., Broadcom Corp., ETrade Group Inc., DoubleClick and Stamps.com, among other high-tech clients.

Brobeck’s Irvine office lacks the dark wood paneling associated with law firms. The prized corner offices, which in other firms are usually reserved for senior partners, are abolished here. One corner spot in the two-story office is used as a kitchen and eating area, another hosts a pingpong table. Brobeck’s leaders like to point out that the firm is not a place where senior partners issue edicts and expect them to be followed. Here, a young lawyer’s e-mail or strategy for a case carries equal weight, said Bruce Hallett, a partner in the Irvine office.

“People are more respected for their results rather than their titles,” he said.

“Dot-com” companies raised the bar by using company stock to boost overall employee compensation. Attempting to prevent attorneys and other staff from leaving for stock riches in client firms, Brobeck now contributes cash for all staff members in an investment fund at the rate of 2.5% of their annual salaries.

Brobeck was one of the first law firms to institute year-round business casual wear. The firm’s attorneys realized they were the only ones wearing so-called suits of armor--dark suits and wingtips or dressy heels--at business meetings.

Many Brobeck attorneys lobbied for Casual Fridays. Then followed Casual Summer and casual year-round. Talk about a slippery slope.

At the 100-lawyer Los Angeles law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, even the name partners come to work in shorts, polo shirts and sandals.

Not everyone is sold on the idea that wearing casual clothes to work is a good thing. Jeffrey Magee, who runs an executive training company in Tulsa, Okla., said his research of 500 companies shows that casual dress could lead to the decline of ethics, morality and productivity in the workplace--and even “gutter language.”

Paul Siegel, a partner at Jackson, Lewis, Schnitzler & Krupman, a prominent national employment law firm, agrees with critics of casual dress, including Miss Manners columnist Judith Martin, that the American workplace is losing a symbolic vocabulary by abolishing dress etiquette.

Siegel counsels his clients against dressing down. “Managers may tend to forget more and more that they are legally different than subordinates,” said Siegel, who says he rarely takes advantage of his firm’s dress-down Friday perk. “When management dresses the same as [other employees] it blurs the line in terms of legal liability.”

Such concerns probably explain why a minority of old-line Wall Street firms, including Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Salomon Smith Barney, have not yet bowed to employee pressure to relax their wardrobe rules.

“People don’t go into banking to be able to wear casual clothing,” a Salomon spokesman said.

But others say Siegel, Magee and other critics need to, well, loosen their ties. John Hilson, managing partner of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison’s Los Angeles office, said he has discovered that productivity has increased among the dozens of lawyers in his office.

“It’s a more relaxed work atmosphere,” Hilson said. “People are professional and they act the same as when they were wearing suits.”

Shelley Wharton, 26, who joined Brobeck in 1998 after graduating from Harvard Law School, said she was thrilled that the firm had a casual-dress policy.

Wharton wears a cashmere sweater and slacks when she visits clients, mainly young Silicon Valley firms. Such attire would have made her persona non grata at a Connecticut law firm where she had clerked.

But casual wear presents its own dangers. Ask Wharton’s colleague Robert DeBerardine, who works in Brobeck’s San Antonio office.

One day last year, DeBerardine had to make a emergency court appearance on behalf of a high-tech client whose business was threatened by a court injunction.

The 42-year-old attorney tore around his office looking for a suit but found none. The best he could scrounge up was a size 46 jacket (he is a 42 regular), a pair of slacks and a Snoopy tie. He went to court and apologized profusely to the judge. She didn’t seem to mind, he said.

DeBerardine now keeps a spare suit in his office--just in case.

Moving to casual wear also presents new problems. Men who were accustomed to dark suits with white shirts and red ties now stand in front of their wardrobes scratching their heads. DeBerardine said his wife won’t let him out of the house without inspecting his ensemble.

According to Wharton, many of her male colleagues “play it safe” by wearing khaki pants and blue Oxford shirts. “There is an army of them in the office,” she said.

Tom Kalenderian, executive vice president of Barneys New York, a favorite store of lawyers and bankers, said that since the law firms and brokerages announced casual dress was cool, “we have women calling our stores making consultation appointments for their their husbands.”

“They know their husbands are having a hard time with this,” he said.