As a workwear supplier, we understand how lively the debate is around the wearing of a suit. Recently the storm has really been unleashed by the decision of Mikey Dickerson, the newly appointed lead administrator of the U.S. Digital Services, not to wear a suit.


Mikey Dickerson is the White House’s most recent recruit and he’s a former Google engineer. He was brought in to save the Healthcare.gov website and having done it with such efficiency he was duly appointed to lead the US governments US Digital Service which is tasked with fixing IT issues.


So he’s not wearing a suit, it would seem to be no big deal to everyone, especially over here in the UK, but the fashion world is up in arms about it and you can pretty much rest assured this will flow down into what everyone does in industry in the next couple of years.


Dickerson has added to the melee with his thoughts on the subject, he doesn’t wear a suit because that’s just “the same old business as usual” with the argument doing that “most of the people who get things done” dress like Mikey.


We largely operate in the construction industry and it’s pretty clear that people don’t generally wear suits for obvious reasons. There are however those construction industry management positions, in which a suit is more appropriate, and we often fulfil orders to kit out a company’s entire workforce with hard wearing corporate suits, in additional to the usual branded work wear such as polo shirts, high viz clothing etc.


In days gone by there were two types of clothing for a worker, those that needed to wear a uniform and those who worked in positions where it didn’t matter. In the modern economy we have many more types of workers, specifically we have the creative.

The creatives seem to wear whatever and often in the creative world the wearing of a suit can be seen to denote a lack of creativity or the kind of lack of confidence needed to buck convention.


There are of course trends in the way we dress, it’s not long ago that a British member of Parliament would have been speaking in a morning suit and more recently would have always have had to wear a tie. So convention changes but for the time being the suit is still the most recognisable form or workwear/corporatewear. It projects an image, it says “I came here to do business”, “I respect you and I’ve made an effort for our encounter”.


That goes for construction too. It can’t be underestimated how important the image of a business is and the boots on the ground, in the trenches tradespeople, are the first impression of a business. Our customers are telling us that in a more competitive market their customers are demanding their staff smarten up.