What are you wearing?
How do you feel about the new Casual Atmosphere?
Are you glad to be grey, in prison style joggers, or do you long for days of the starched suit?
Perhaps you’re permanently video-call ready in a suitably inoffensive teal polo:
These conversations may feel twelve months out of date, but it’s only now some corners of the country are shifting in this area under the weight of this over a year-long pandemic.
Take London’s Jermyn Street, home to some of London’s most old fashioned and expensive tailors, where handmade brogues are giving way to trainers, hoodies are replacing formal shirts.
The shop that made Admiral Lord Nelson’s cocked hat now sells neon cashmere beanie hats alongside its top hats and smoking caps.
This begs a number of questions. Namely, who is still buying smoking caps? And can I have one?
But when even the most starchy of establishments gives in to ‘loungewear’ it’s a sure sign that things are changing.
And this is good.
Because formalwear is still what people associate with the quintessential financial adviser. The guy in the shiny pinstripe suit trying to get his sweaty paws on your life savings so he can spend it on champagne and cocaine.
We know this is out of date, but many people don’t.
It’s still seen as fairly wild to wear a t-shirt to a meeting these days if you’re in finance, or to sit on a sofa rather than across a table.
So it’s worth making a thing of because it says so much about your approach and the way you work, ie, that it’s fair, transparent and part of the 21st century.
And a world away from the City and that strange, closed world of impenetrable jargon, dodgy ethics and top hat and tails.
Cheers to that.
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