The Slush conference hall in Helsinki resembles many things, but a boardroom is not one of them. Trainers everywhere. New Balance, mostly, with the occasional pair of Vejas for those who fancy themselves a bit more sophisticated. Not a tie in sight. A keynote speaker discussing a 50 million euros Series C is wearing what appear to be Crocs. Nobody thinks this odd.
In Dushanbe, I’m the odd one. My European outfit—smart(ish) jeans, shirt, leather shoes but no tie—is causing a minor stir at an investment forum. Tajik ministers eye me with what might be pity but is more than likely loathing. Central Asian investors, immaculate in their suits and Windsor knots, shake my hand with the careful politeness reserved for the sartorially challenged. I have seriously misjudged the room.
Between Helsinki and Dushanbe lies more than distance. The suit—that pinnacle of 20th-century corporate conformity—has been routed in Western Europe. Jeans have won. Head east and it’s a different country. In Central Asia, the Caucasus, even bits of Eastern Europe, the suit doesn’t just remain acceptable. It’s compulsory. This sartorial fault line matters more than you’d think.
The casual manifesto
As always, blame Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs’s black turtleneck wasn’t just personal preference, it was a manifesto. Why waste time on clothes when you’re reinventing phones? Mark Zuckerberg’s grey T-shirts said the same thing, only less impressively. The message: we’re too busy being important to care about archaic dress codes.
Tech’s sartorial nihilism proved contagious. Goldman Sachs ditched its dress code in 2019, worried about recruiting and retaining talent. Once Wall Street’s stuffiest bank went casual, the game was up. Covid-19 finished the job. Zoom meetings normalised the pyjamas-first approach to dressing. By 2022, the suit was done.
Travel east, though, and you’re in a different world. Almaty, Bishkek, Tashkent—suits everywhere. Government officials wouldn’t dream of showing up in barbeque slacks. Even start-up founders, those supposed rebels, smarten up for investor meetings. The studied carelessness of Western tech—that, ‘my idea’s so brilliant I needn’t dress for you’ vibe—hasn’t caught on.
Part of it is institutional. Economies in Central Asia remain hierarchical in ways that make Western European business look anarchic. In Tajikistan or Uzbekistan, a suit shows respect—not just for the person you’re meeting, but for the meeting itself. Turn up in casual Friday gear and you’ve basically insulted everyone in the room.
Then there’s aspiration. When you’re still catching up economically, when membership in the global business club feels earnt rather than automatic, the suit becomes your entry ticket. It announces: we belong here, we’re serious, we’re not provincial. Silicon Valley’s casual dress needs confidence. You’ve got to be taken seriously before you can afford not to take yourself seriously.
Rude, not liberating
Culture matters too. Central Asian business culture mixes formality with older traditions that prize dignity and presentation. Where elders command respect and hierarchy structures everything, the egalitarian scruffiness of a Helsinki tech conference doesn’t read as liberating. It reads as rude. Age comes into it as well. In Dushanbe, I noticed younger entrepreneurs dressed down a little more than their elders—but still wore proper shoes, which already puts them miles ahead of Helsinki’s New Balance brigade.
The gender dimension deserves mention. Women in business have long had to follow a narrower and more treacherous sartorial path than men. The ‘power suit’ of the 1980s was always more uniform than liberation. As men’s workwear has casualised, women’s options have paradoxically expanded. The woman in trainers and jeans at a European start-up conference exercises a choice her mother never had. Further east, where suits still reign, women often face stricter expectations about professional appearance than their male colleagues—a small tyranny that casual dress helps dismantle.
What occurs as economies converge? Will the suit vanish completely, or will we witness a counter-reformation? Whispers of a resurgence of formal dress can already be heard in some European circles. Certain banks and law firms have never stopped wearing formal attire. Additionally, younger workers, seeking to distance themselves from the casual trends of millennials, sometimes embrace vintage formal wear.
However, these trends are more niche than indicative of a larger shift. The decline of the suit in the West seems to be a structural change rather than a cyclical one.
Pack accordingly
For now, the business traveller crossing from Brussels to Bishkek must pack accordingly. A decent rule of thumb is the further from a major tech hub, the more formal the dress. It is crude but surprisingly accurate. Geography is not quite destiny, but it remains a reliable predictor of whether one’s trainers will cause comment.
The irony, of course, is that the casualisation of Western business dress happened just as the rest of the world was adopting Western business norms. Colonial empires implored (in some cases dictated) the wearing of suits, then decided suits were oppressive. Whether this represents cultural evolution or a bait-and-switch depends, rather like appropriate business attire itself, on where you’re standing.
From my perch in the European Casual Zone, trainers and jeans seem self-evidently sensible. But I remember the looks in Dushanbe. Next time, I’ll pack a tie.
Photo: Dreamstime.
