Casual Friday (also known as dress-down Friday or casual day) is a Western dress code trend in which businesses relax their dress code on Fridays. Businesses that usually require employees to wear

suit A suit, also called a lounge suit, business suit, dress suit, or formal suit, is a set of clothes comprising a suit jacket and trousers of identical textiles generally worn with a collared dress shirt, necktie, and dress shoes. A skirt su ...

dress shirt A dress shirt, button shirt, button-front, button-front shirt, or button-up shirt is a garment with a Collar (clothing), collar and a full-length opening at the front, which is fastened using buttons or shirt studs. A button-down or button-down ...

necktie A necktie, long tie, or simply a tie, is a cloth article of formal neckwear or office attire worn for decorative or symbolic purposes, resting under a folded shirt collar or knotted at the throat, and usually draped down the chest. On rare o ...

s, and dress shoes, may allow more casual or business casual wear on such days. In 1994, 497 of the 1000 most important companies in America observed casual Friday, including

General Motors General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. The company is most known for owning and manufacturing f ...

, Ford, and

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

. The trend originated from

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; ) is an island U.S. state, state of the United States, in the Pacific Ocean about southwest of the U.S. mainland. One of the two Non-contiguous United States, non-contiguous U.S. states (along with Alaska), it is the only sta ...

's midcentury custom of Aloha Friday which slowly spread to

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, continuing around the globe until the 1990s when it became known as Casual Friday. Casual Friday began in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, when

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

allowed its employees to dress more casually on Friday and work on new ideas. In Hawaii, "Aloha Wear" is suitable business attire any day of the week, and the term "Aloha Friday" is generally used simply to refer to the last day of the

workweek The weekdays and weekend are the complementary parts of the week, devoted to labour and rest, respectively. The legal weekdays (British English), or workweek (American English), is the part of the seven-day week devoted to working. In most ...

. Valerie Steele described the introduction of casual Friday as the most radical change in work fashion since the 70s, when women asked for the right to wear trousers in the office.Anne D'Innocenzio: ''Casual confusion: what to wear?'' in: ''WWD'', vol 169, n. 75, 19 April 1995, pp. 6–7.

References

*Moran, Malie; Pohlmann, Attila & Reilly, Andrew (2014) ''Honolulu Street Style''.

University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press is the university press of the University of Chicago, a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. It is the largest and one of the oldest university presses in the United States. It pu ...

, ISSN 2047-0568, ; p. 59. {{Employment Workwear Friday Casual wear

See also

References