How Work Style Has Changed in the Return-to-Office Era

In April, Google made a startling announcement to staff: Come back to the office or lose your job. It echoed similar mandates put forth by Amazon last year, by JP Morgan in March, and by Uber last month. After years of various fits and starts, employers are getting serious—like, really serious this time—about calling employees back to the workplace. And while a wide swath of companies have required some version of post-COVID office attendance for some time now, there seems to be real momentum building for a proper “return to office” happening, with deadlines looming in the fall.

But the office is a vastly different place today than it was five years ago—as are the workers themselves. People have moved, gotten older, changed careers, become parents, settled into new behaviors. They have discovered the joys of comfortable clothing—or perhaps now feel that their outfits should speak more directly to who they are. For many, the very notion of building a separate, blander wardrobe specifically for the workplace seems somehow antiquated.

Take, for instance, Bernardo Teran, a designer and project manager at a Los Angeles architecture firm. The months he spent working from home during the pandemic allowed him to reassess both his wardrobe and his overall approach to getting dressed. In his spare time he started watching classic Hollywood movies and engaging with men’s fashion content on TikTok, both of which he credits with expanding his style horizons and sharpening his eye.

When his office asked employees back full-time in 2023, Teran made subtle but telling adjustments to his workplace uniform. He got into watches during the pandemic, and upgraded his junky sneakers to Prada brogues. These changes reflected not only his evolving taste but his stage of life and professional status—he went into the pandemic in his late 20s and came out in his early 30s. He got a promotion. He pruned his closet to reflect all that, focusing on simple, versatile items sourced from higher-quality brands. “Before the pandemic, dressing ‘like an architect’ felt important to me,” he said. “Now, I just wear what I like.”

When Matt Goulet, an editorial manager for a national retailer, was asked to come back to the office about a year ago, he understood immediately that some ineffable thing had shifted. “I’m completely confounded by it,” he said of dressing for his job now. “It’s almost like Severance—I have to wear this and be this. Meanwhile, on Mondays and Fridays, we’re on Zoom, and you’ll catch me wearing a baseball cap and a Reese Cooper hoodie.”

Before the pandemic, Goulet wore what he refers to as the “millennial man’s first corporate job uniform”: brown dress shoes, dark jeans, and a button-down Oxford shirt, sometimes with a sweater over top. Staid, respectable. But after years of working from home, he was able to explore a style that felt more like an authentic expression of himself than a costume to appease a corporation. If Goulet had his way, he’d likely be wearing basketball shorts and hoodies most of the time, but he splits the difference for office days; these days, he says, his look is “casualified.” Usually, it’s a knit sweater and some jeans and sneakers—a combination that is comfortable but, in Goulet’s view, lacks any sense of self expression.