Wearing shorts still a ‘grey area’ as offices scrap dress codes

When I call Tony Hardy, it’s a sunny day. As he often does during the summer months, he’s wearing a pair of shorts in the office.

“We wear shorts all the time,” he says.

Tony runs a branding agency in Northumberland, with nine employees. His company, Canny Creative, doesn’t have a dress code. Instead he encourages staff to dress professionally but comfortably – especially because the air conditioning in their office has recently broken.

“Imagine sweating buckets all day and being really uncomfortable and then expecting them to also turn out great work,” Tony says.

With summer upon us, and much of Britain set to be basking in a heatwave this week and next, keeping cool in the office and during the commute can be a challenge. Take one look at TikTok, and you’ll see that the topic of whether or not shorts are ever appropriate for the office remains highly contentious.

And in a 2022 YouGov poll, 66% of Britons said that it was acceptable for men to wear shorts in the office, up from 37% in 2016 – though the 2022 poll was conducted on the UK’s hottest-ever day.

What people wear to the office has “just gone so casual” in the past few years, with more people wearing jeans and trainers to work, says personal stylist Karina Taylor. She attributes that largely to the Covid pandemic, when people could dress much more casually to work from home.

This included people wearing shorts as they worked from their kitchens or home offices, says Carmen Bellot, style editor at Esquire magazine – they no longer had to think about the bottom half of their outfits while on video-call meetings.

But wearing shorts to the office is still “very much a grey area”, Karina says, describing them as “the ultimate casual piece of clothing”.

Stylists agree that whether or not you can wear shorts to the office is overwhelmingly based on context – and they’re often too casual for client-facing roles such as law and finance.

The professionals advise that if your company has no explicit dress code, you should monitor what your colleagues are wearing and decide whether shorts would look out of place.

Otherwise “you may be pushing the boundaries,” warns Nick Hems, a personal stylist in London.

The BBC contacted a range of companies to ask if they had a formal dress code and whether shorts would be acceptable to wear to the office, if styled professionally.

Many companies, including consultancy Accenture and British American Tobacco, told the BBC they don’t have explicit dress codes but expect staff to dress both comfortably and professionally, and to take extra care to dress appropriately when meeting clients or attending events.

Accounting giant PwC says it trusts staff to make “appropriate decisions” about what to wear to work. “We don’t list items that people can and can’t wear,” a spokesperson said.

Santander says both casual and business dress is acceptable for staff who aren’t required to wear a uniform, but noted “anything that could be beachwear isn’t okay for the office”.

So if your company does allow you to wear shorts to the office, what sort of shorts should you go for?

There’s a clear consensus among the experts: keep it formal – ideally tailored – and don’t go too short. Beach, sports, cargo and denim shorts are generally all no-gos.

But this isn’t the case for all companies.

At social media marketing agency We Are Social, some employees have even worn hot pants to work, according to managing director, Lucy Doubleday.

“You can wear what you want,” she says, with the company seeing clothing as an expression of creativity.

It’s a similar story for CEO Tony and his team, who even wear shorts to client meetings, including when they visited London to meet staff at a major bank’s headquarters in Canary Wharf.

“We did get really strange looks,” Tony says. “Everybody there was in suits and it was boiling hot. But we’re a creative agency and we went as we would go to our regular meetings.”

He argues that if another company has a problem with how his staff dress, they probably aren’t the right fit to work together.

Shorts might be perceived differently on men and women, stylists suggest. Carmen says that even outside the office, shorts can be “quite divisive among men,” she says.

“When I speak to men about their opinions on shorts, they tend to say that they don’t feel comfortable wearing them when not on holiday,” Carmen says. “I don’t think there’s this type of sentiment in womenswear.”

Some men embrace the opportunity to get out of long trousers, though – including 46-year-old primary school headteacher, Dave McPartlin.

At his school in Lancashire he spends most of the final weeks of term before the summer holidays wearing shorts.

Dave thinks it’s “ridiculous” people are still discussing whether it’s appropriate to wear shorts for work – and the students don’t treat him any differently based on what he wears, he says. “I don’t think they could care less.”

Diane Brander wears shorts to work sometimes, too. She says her performance in her account administration job “would probably suffer” if she was too hot in the office and unable to wear shorts, and says she finds them more comfortable than skirts and dresses.

So what should you do? Karina’s best advice is to only wear shorts to work if you’re confident about your company’s dress code and how to style them.

“If in doubt, probably avoid,” Karina says, “because it will cause you far too much stress to get the look right and you maybe won’t feel confident about pulling it off.”