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For many years in large corporations, pretty much the only acceptable dress was white shirt, tie, dark suit, and dress shoes. We were still wearing something like that at. trade shows into the 1990s before things started loosening up.

(Mildly funny story. One big, probably Unix, show the IBM staff showed in logoed polos and suddenly everyone else is like If IBM doesn’t need suits we sure don’t.)

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I started dressing nice at work, reasoning that looking sharp would buy me a few seconds or minutes of grace to allow my social deficiencies to catch up - just in case an executive decided to ask me a question.

Of course, that never happened for months, years until the one day I went in wearing cargo pants and a gothy synth band shirt and was greeted by a delegation of executives from out of town engaging everyone in small talk…

I worked for a downtown firm for a while which loosened up dress code a little bit so I didn’t always wear my jacket in—though cargo pants and rock T would definitely have led to an HR meeting. One day I had to borrow a jacket from someone when I had to go to a nearby studio for a TV interview:-)

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