Is it ever ok to wear shorts to the office?
During a long, hot summer in the capital, an age- old debate has reared its head: should men ever wear shorts to the office? James Ford explains why it is never, ever ok.
No. It isn’t. Not even in a heatwave. End of. Full stop. At the risk of incurring my editor’s ire, I’m tempted to conclude my column there for this week. Nothing more to add. No further comment required. I should just leave a big, blank space in the paper so that any readers who do think shorts are acceptable office attire can just take a minute and think about all the ways in which they are wrong.
But maybe – just maybe – I should expand on my point of view. Maybe, dear reader, I owe you a more considered argument as to why wearing shorts in the office is not just unacceptable but unforgivable.
Firstly, there are the obvious arguments: shorts are very informal, verging on controversial. Bloomberg recently conducted a poll of US clients in the business world and found that only 45 per cent of them find it appropriate to wear shorts at work. More worryingly, critics called the look “unprofessional.” Opinion in the UK is shifting though. A Yougov poll in 2016 found that just 37 per cent of workers thought that shorts were appropriate office attire. But, when asked the same question this year, that figure was now 68 per cent. Of course, that still means nearly a third of the work force are not on board with the proposition. That is a pretty big chunk of your staff – and your clients – that are opposed.
if you want to go to work dressed like some granola-chomping hippy who needs to crowd-source opinions on the right way to tie your shoes, sure – you go ahead and wear your shorts to work.
Secondly there are the aesthetic arguments. Shorts mean a sea of knobbly knees, wobbly thighs and hairy legs wherever you look in the office. Nobody wants that trauma. The Japanese recently relaxed the rules for workers and apparently it has prompted a heated debate about shorts etiquette and ‘leg hair harrasment’. And, even if you are fortunate enough to work somewhere where your colleagues all look like beachwear models with hairless legs, that generates a whole host of other HR problems and lost productivity due to excessive ogling.
Worse still, shorts are a notoriously tricky clothing item to pair correctly when it comes to footwear. If you permit shorts you are opening the door to a whole host of bad choices: Flip flops. Yacht shoes. Loafers worn without socks. Or, the worst fashion crime of all, sandals paired with socks. (Some 69 per cent of Brits consider sandals to be acceptable in the office – slightly more than the number who think shorts are ok in the workplace!) Heaven forfend. Imagine if your clients see your office clad in Birkenstocks and resembling the front row of Lib Dem conference. Your business is dead. Finished. Kaputt. There is no coming back from that.
Shorts are left-wing
If another – fourth – reason to be opposed to shorts in the office was required, there is always Ford’s Law. This states that any rational person should always do the opposite of whatever The Guardian urges them to. And last year The Guardian opined: “Yes, you can wear shorts to the office”. Their main argument seemed to be that The Guardian doesn’t have a dress code, so why should anywhere else? I’m not surprised. A year earlier, one of their readers wrote in to paper to ask if their boyfriend should double knot their shoes. (That article ran to over 1200 words and generated 768 comments). This is about their level of fashion insight. So, if you want to go to work dressed like some granola-chomping hippy who needs to crowd-source opinions on the right way to tie your shoes, sure – you go ahead and wear your shorts to work. But you are signalling you are a bit of a leftie as surely as if you wore a keffiyeh, carried a Palestinian flag and started quoting Marx. If you think that is going to get you that big raise/next promotion/a corner office, you are sorely mistaken.
I understand the temptation to ‘free the knee’ and don shorts, especially in the current heatwave that is ravaging the capital. I could hedge my bets and fudge my arguments. I could say that it depends on where you work, what sector your firm is in (financial services = no, creative industries = yes) and what the office culture is like. But why risk it? Shorts look sloppy and unprofessional. And this is not a good look for any business. Keep your knobbly knees covered. You have been warned.
James Ford was an advisor to former Mayor of London Boris Johnson