Brooks Brothers Survived Two World Wars. The Pandemic Killed It.

A 170-year-old suit institution went bankrupt in 2020. Here's the real, decades-long story of how formal wear actually lost — and why it's not coming back the way people expect.

The bankruptcy that says more than any survey

Numbers can describe a trend. A bankruptcy filing proves one actually happened. In July 2020, Brooks Brothers — a brand that had dressed American businessmen, and reportedly several US presidents, for over 170 years — filed for bankruptcy. It wasn't a company that failed to adapt to changing fashion tastes over a season or two; it was an institution that had survived two world wars and the Great Depression, brought down specifically by a shift away from formal office wear that had been building for decades and then collapsed almost overnight.

Because the pandemic didn't start the trend — it finished it. The real origin story goes back to the 1980s and 90s, when "business casual" was effectively born in Silicon Valley. Tech companies were competing for the same scarce, highly skilled talent as more traditional, formal industries, and a relaxed dress code became a genuine competitive tool. As wardrobe stylist Jessica Cadmus put it, a casual atmosphere was something "very appealing" to the top talent tech firms were trying to poach — comfort became a retention strategy, not just an aesthetic choice.

The slow decline, then the sudden collapse

From that Silicon Valley starting point, the trend spread gradually for two decades — hoodies and jeans in tech, then slowly bleeding into other industries competing for similar talent. Then came 2020, and eighteen months of remote work normalized dressing for a webcam instead of an office, for millions of people simultaneously, across every industry at once. When employees did return, the data on what they wanted was stark: one UK employee survey found 28% did not want to return to any formal dress code at all, and a genuinely striking 33% said they would turn down a job specifically because it required one.

That's a £303 million drop in just three years — not a gentle decline, a genuine collapse in a single category of menswear that had been a wardrobe staple for generations.

The older data point that complicates the story

Here's what keeps this from being a simple "casual is just better" narrative: a 1998 USA Today survey — predating the modern casual shift by over two decades — found 64% of respondents said they worked more efficiently when dressed formally, and 51% said they did their best work while dressed formally. Only 41% felt casual dress improved their productivity. That's a real, older data point suggesting the relationship between clothing and performance isn't a simple one-directional story — it's shifted meaningfully as workplace culture itself changed, not because the underlying psychology of clothing changed.

Almost certainly some of both — and it's worth being honest that no rigorous scientific study definitively proves clothing directly drives productivity in either direction. What's real is the belief itself: in 1998, most people believed formality helped performance, largely because that reflected the dominant workplace culture of the time. Culture shapes the belief as much as any objective effect does — which is exactly why the pandemic could shift people's self-reported experience so dramatically in the other direction within a few years.

India's own, earlier version of this story

India didn't wait for a global pandemic to start this shift — IT companies here were leading toward casual, comfort-focused dress years before 2020, with branded hoodies, premium t-shirts, and optional dress code policies becoming genuinely common well ahead of the curve in other sectors. The classic "formal Monday-to-Thursday, semi-formal Friday" pattern that many Indian IT employees will recognize was an early, homegrown, incremental version of exactly the trend that hit Brooks Brothers all at once elsewhere. By the time the rest of the corporate world was debating hybrid dress codes in 2021 and 2022, Indian tech had already normalized a version of this for the better part of a decade.

What this actually means going forward

The honest read isn't "formal wear is dead" — traditional sectors like banking, law, and government-adjacent roles have moved far less than tech, and client-facing, court, and investor-facing moments still reliably call for real formality. What's actually changed is that formal dress lost its default status. It used to be the assumed baseline everywhere, adjusted downward for casual industries. Now it's a deliberate, situational choice — something you put on for a specific reason, not something you wear because that's simply what work clothes are. That's a genuinely different relationship with formal clothing than existed a generation ago, and it's why a well-made shirt that works for both registers — structured enough for a client meeting, relaxed enough for an ordinary Tuesday — has become more valuable, not less, in a wardrobe that has to flex between both worlds now.