Forget the black pants. Nix the blazers. At home, we wear what we want—and research suggests that our work benefits.
For The Wall Street Journal
Photo illustrations by Yasara Gunawardena for The Wall Street Journal
Bill Hall has 50 French-cuff dress shirts, twice as many cuff links, 100 ties on motorized racks and at least 40 pairs of suspenders, most of them silk. He hasn’t touched any of them since March 2020.
Instead, his uniform has been a T-shirt, slippers and pajama pants, or baggy jeans when carrying his phone around in the pocket of his PJ pants started to bug him. Occasionally, he’ll indulge in a pair of silk pajamas—dark blue with white pinstripes—he received for Christmas.
“Why get dressed up at home?” asks the 70-year-old Mr. Hall, who works in procurement from his Frederick, Md., home these days.
What do we wear while working remotely? Whatever we want. Even as we are called back to the office, we might take some of our new sartorial selves with us.
We’ve gone casual, yes—goodbye hard pants—and we’ve also gone weird, authentic and free. Our hair is gathered in messy ponytails, left to its natural colors or textures, or hidden under beanies and ball caps. We’ve ditched makeup, razors, deodorant. A January survey from a consortium of academic researchers found that commuters spend an average of 27.8 minutes grooming and getting ready for the day, compared with 19.1 minutes for telecommuters. The latter are less likely to shower daily and put on fresh clothes, too.
Freed from seeing patients in person, psychologist Lane Vander Sluis has whittled his wardrobe down to three pairs of shorts and six T-shirts. Shielded from the elements in a forever 68-degree home office, several remote workers told me that it can be springtime all year long.
