It’s Casual Friday, Every Day

Increasingly lax office culture means we have not two wardrobes—work and play—but one. Is anything allowed at work?

When Emily Birch got dressed for work on a recent Monday morning, she didn’t plug in the iron, and she didn’t pull out a can of starch. She didn’t even scrounge for a lint roller. Birch, 46, hopped out of bed and donned the first thing she could find. “An ancient old tie-dyed T shirt and a pair of army shorts,” she says, laughing. “I just sort of threw on clothes.” Thusly prepped, she ate breakfast and went into the office—by walking into the next room.

As a Pennsylvania-based editor for a California publishing company, Birch is one of the country’s growing number of telecommuters. For her, “going into work” is walking over from her bedroom into her home office, where she sometimes checks e-mail in her pajamas. “I’m spending way less money on clothes, because I’m not dressing up for other people,” she says.


Telecommuting is changing our culture—and so are the fields we’re choosing to work in, from near or far. The Department of Labor calls computer-systems design and related services “among the fastest growing industries in the economy,” and says sectors software engineering and data systems are the most likely to surge over the next five years—jobs you can do from anywhere, no-suit-required.

But what happens when it’s time to head back into the office or to a client meeting? With an estimated 2 million American businesses equipped to allow workers to telecommute, possibly in their PJs or T’s, will business-casual dress codes devolve into a whatever-goes attitude?

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