Fridays

0

Santa Monica adman Jim Smith prefers to work in soccer shorts and sandals. But he admits there’s always “a suit hanging in the back of the car.”

That’s one way to do business in Los Angeles, the land of the jeans and the suits.

As with so much else about this city, the answer to the question, “What should I wear to work?” is multicultural: It depends on what you do, where you are doing it, and who you are doing it with.

Indeed, in Los Angeles, the concept of “appropriate” business attire changes, literally, with the landscape.

Imagine a map of Los Angeles, says UCLA management professor Karen Stephenson, with the color yellow signifying casual workplaces and blue for more formal offices. Downtown would be a big blue heart with arteries coming out of it leading to other centers of suitdom. Elsewhere throughout the region, various pockets of yellow would represent the movie studios and their environs.

The city as a whole would look like “a lot of blue hubs connected by arteries with yellow splotches between them,” Stephenson says.

Suit culture pervades the high-rises of downtown, Century City and the Wilshire corridor areas heavy on financial services and other businesses where an image of sobriety and probity is paramount.

At the downtown and Century City offices of O’Melveny & Myers, the city’s oldest law firm, for example, denim and athletic shoes are forbidden even on casual Fridays.

The casual zones can be found where the creative community clusters. You’ll see lots of cheap chic around the film studios and on the Westside, in industries such as entertainment, software and advertising.

This is the milieu preferred by adman Smith, a managing partner at Ground Zero.

“People tend to work more creatively in a relaxed environment,” Smith says. “And I don’t see people looking really relaxed in suits.”

Of course, there are subtle shadings within those zones. And L.A.’s jeans and suit cultures often mix during the course of doing business, softening the boundaries between them.

In fact, much of the commerce that takes place in Los Angeles consists of one culture adjusting to the other. One of Ground Zero’s clients, Beverly Hills-based City National Bank, comes from the suit side. And O’Melveny & Myers’ list of business clients runs the gamut, from Fortune 100 giants to tiny start-ups.

This can require some adjustments in the corporate look, said Karen Newlove, O’Melveny & Myers’ acting director of marketing. The firm’s lawyers need to demonstrate that they take their clients’ business seriously, Newlove says, and that requires some formality. But they also need to draw a careful line at showing off, or looking like stuffed shirts.

“I can’t think of a time when I’ve said (to an attorney), ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to wear a tie,’ ” Newlove says. On the other hand, she did recall one presentation for a casual-culture client in which “we advised our people to take off their jackets.”

Jeans and T-shirts wouldn’t have been appropriate, she says, “but we also wanted to respect their culture.”

At Ground Zero, according to Smith, the firm’s casual look appeals to clients, many of whom “tend to try to merge into our culture when they come to our office.” To Smith this makes sense, because he finds the traditional suit culture over-ritualized and confining, like “old knights going out to fight” in suits of armor.

And he is convinced that the long-term trend favors the jeans culture favored by Ground Zero.

“You’ve got this gradual progression since the end of World War II” toward “more relaxed” apparel, he says. “Everybody’s growing up now. Even the old knights didn’t wear armor all the time.”

But Smith does keep that suit handy, and not all businesses are succumbing to denim creep.

The financial industry, for one, is holding the line against casual dress. And the same is true for health care, according to Richard Brock, a health care consultant with the accounting firm Ernst & Young LLP, who says his hospital-administrator clients have yet to abandon the formal look. In fact, Brock says he has found “very few” hospitals that even allow casual dress on Fridays.

And even that bastion of jeans culture, the entertainment industry, has its enclaves of formality.

Walt Disney Co., for example, is considered relatively formal, attire-wise, compared with other big studios perhaps a function of it being one of Wall Street’s most watched conglomerates. And don’t forget, Disney is more than just movies and TV. It also manages theme parks, where the need for safety, order and cleanliness encourage a buttoned-down management image.

But at DreamWorks SKG, “Every day is casual Friday,” says Terry Press, the studio’s head of marketing.

Even DreamWorks principal Jeffrey Katzenberg, who wore a suit every day during his tenure at Disney, has embraced the casual look, (and, according to Press, sometimes encourages visitors to Dreamworks to get more relaxed by taking off their ties).

But the company still must impose some limits, says Press. “You have to take into account that other people are walking through,” such as those from the buttoned-down worlds of law and banking.

Technology is perhaps the most notorious dress-down industry. “Bill Gates is the richest man in the world,” says Press, “and the only time I’ve seen him in a tie is when he’s had to testify.”

UCLA’s Stephenson says the casual movement goes back even further than the development of the computer industry to earlier research-and-development work and think tanks, where bright people were brought together in campus-like settings to hatch new ideas and technology. Relaxation and comfortable dress went with this “think” environment, and now the casual look has become a badge for people who want to be seen as creative that is, as high-value “knowledge workers.”

But Stephenson who has a doctorate in anthropology and, in addition to teaching, runs her own software company doesn’t think this makes the legions of casual dressers in Los Angeles any smarter than the tailored types in the high-rises.

As for Smith’s notion that shorts and sandals are a way to “eliminate the ritual in business,” Stephenson says the casual look just substitutes one set of formalities for another. “It’s a uniform just like any other formal dress,” she says.

No posts to display