Casual Friday

Casual Friday, also called Dress Down Day, Casual Dress Day, and Business Casual Day, is a loosening of the business world』s unwritten dress codes on designated days. Employees trade suits, ties, high heels, silk shirts, scarves and other formal business attire for slacks, sports coats, polo shirts, pressed jeans, loafers, knit tunics, and flat heeled shoes. Casual days arose in the mid-1980s influenced by the jeans-T-shirt-sneakers uniform of the computer industry, as well as increased numbers of women in the workplace and work-at-home employees. The concept caught on in the early 1990s and, fueled partly by Levi-Strauss』s marketing, by the mid-1990s had become a corporate institution. By the late 1990s, employees below middle management in one third of U.S companies had gone casual five days a week, according to an Evans Research Associates』 survey. Casual Friday is intertwined with American society』s urge to wear comfortable clothing all the time. 

--ViBrina Coronado