Pinstripes vanished from the face of the Earth in 2020, the kind of job that calls for a pinstripe being the kind of job that can now be done from a laptop at home. As a rule, people who work on construction sites or in pharmacies, on buses or in health surgeries don’t wear pinstripes. And people who wear pinstripes for work don’t wear them at the weekends.
So, in the work-from-home era, they completely disappeared. And it seemed for a while like pinstripes might never come back, that they’d go the way of morning suits or formal hats, relegated from real life and only seen on the edges, as fancy dress or on fancy days.
The same could be said for lots of old-school nine-to-five attire; ways of dressing which, not that long ago, were so normal we didn’t even notice them. Wearing a tie. Nude tights. Briefcases. A certain profile of nondescript leather shoe. All pretty much gone in a puff of smoke. Even politicians started wearing half-zip sweaters and smart trainers, conscious that looking dressed for the office made them look out of step with the people.
Not that this was all a straightforward or inevitable impact of the pandemic, by the way. If hybrid working transformed how we dress, it was because it was pushing at an open door. Casualisation had been eroding the old-school ways since the arrival of Dress Down Friday. What lockdown did was give legitimacy and authority to comfort dressing. It formalised informal dressing as the modern work wardrobe.
But in fashion, as in life, the one constant is change. Just because a look has been benched for half a decade doesn’t mean it’s over – quite the opposite. It means it is ripe for a comeback. Which is what is happening now. “Nine-to-five dressing” is being name-checked by designers and stylists as a New Look for 2024. Pinstripe suiting, oversized blazers and gobstopper earrings are back in business.