Bella Figura or Basically Pajamas: A Relocator's Guide to Dressing for Work in Italy and the Netherlands

🇮🇹 Italy · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

According to Eurostat consumption data, Italian and Dutch households spend almost identical shares of their budgets on clothing and footwear — 5.20 percent and 5.10 percent, respectively. This is the kind of statistic that promises convergence and delivers absolutely none. In Italy, that money buys fewer, better things, ironed into submission and worn like a small moral statement. In the Netherlands, it buys a waterproof jacket, a second waterproof jacket, and whatever happens to be on sale at a store with a name that is also a verb. Both countries will judge you for how you dress. They will simply judge you for opposite reasons, on different timelines, using entirely different evidence, and neither will tell you the rules until you've already broken one.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇹 Italy

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Italy: The Audit Never Ends

Italy does not technically have a dress code so much as a dress expectation, enforced socially rather than written anywhere, which is worse. The concept locals call bella figura — literally "beautiful figure," practically "making a fitting impression" — extends dress into a proxy for character. According to Italy Handbook's explainer on the custom, a careless appearance reads as a lack of decoro, or respect, and the lapse has its own name: a brutta figura, a bad impression you can apparently commit with the wrong shoes. Job postings sometimes ask for bella presenza — good presence — which, reassuringly, means neat grooming and suitable dress rather than runway looks. Ironed cotton beats a designer label that looks slept in.

This is not limited to the office. The Local's reporting on foreign residents "going native" describes a flip-flop wearer in Piedmont stopped by an elderly neighbor and asked, not gently, whether she thought she was at the beach; another reader stopped wearing gym shoes entirely and started treating footwear condition as a daily maintenance task, on the theory that people who look careless get treated accordingly. A third reader in Padua simply replaced his entire wardrobe and changed his hairstyle, on the grounds that his goal was "to fit in rather than stand out," which is a more complete capitulation than most relocation guides prepare you for. None of this requires wealth. It requires attention, which is in some ways more demanding than money, since attention cannot be bought on sale.

For salaried work specifically, the expectations scale with how public-facing the role is. A back-office engineer in Milan can get away with dark, well-fitted basics and good shoes; someone client-facing, or anyone dealing with the comune, a notary, or a bank, is expected to visibly dress for the occasion. Expats quoted in TalesMag's Real Post Report on Rome go further, noting that well-dressed people are handled noticeably better in bureaucratic settings — which turns a wardrobe decision into something closer to a productivity hack.

The Netherlands: Dressed Down, Never Dressed Sloppy

The Dutch default reads, on arrival, as a relief: no ties, no blazers, a CEO in the same jeans as the intern. DutchNews.nl's reporting on Dutch business etiquette confirms the trend is real — even in Amsterdam's financial district, ties have "largely disappeared," per etiquette consultants quoted in the piece, and the overall direction is "getting less formal." But informality here is its own code, not an absence of one. The same reporting notes that a full suit at a creative agency can misread as a sign you don't understand the room, which is a strange kind of pressure: dress correctly by dressing down correctly.

The limits of the casualness are oddly specific. Statistics Netherlands' own consumer-spending releases track the Dutch habit of buying more clothing and furniture in good economic years, but the category breakdown tells you nothing about the actual argument that recurs every July, when a national debate resurfaces over whether men may wear shorts to the office — tracked in detail by outlets like DutchReview — while women's summer dress draws no comparable scrutiny. The casualness, in other words, has rules. They are just unevenly applied, and nobody will write them down for you.

There is also a quieter sorting mechanism at work: the bicycle. The Hague International Centre and similar relocation guides note that Dutch professional dress is planned around the commute as much as the meeting, which is why rainwear gets budgeted before blazers and why a wrinkle-resistant fabric matters more than a flattering cut. A visiting American or Italian colleague who shows up in leather-soled shoes and a structured coat will survive exactly one rainy commute before updating their wardrobe. The office itself rarely issues the correction. The weather does.

The Reckoning

Here is the trap: both countries will tell you, correctly, that they are relatively relaxed about fashion compared to, say, Paris or Milan's own runway shows. Neither statement prepares you for what "relaxed" actually permits. Hofstede Insights' country-comparison data scores the Netherlands far lower than Italy on Masculinity, a dimension tied to status display and visible success — which tracks with a culture where showing off, including through clothes, reads as slightly suspect. Italy scores higher, and status display through appearance is closer to expected. The two countries are not on different levels of formality; they are measuring formality against entirely different things. Italy formalizes through care and quality. The Netherlands formalizes through restraint and conformity to understatement.

The genuinely disorienting part is that both systems are equally capable of humiliating you for the same shirt. Overdress in Amsterdam and you look like you're compensating. Underdress in Milan and you look like you don't respect the room, or yourself. The brochure version of "casual Netherlands, stylish Italy" survives exactly until your first client meeting, when you realize precision is required in both places — it has just been relabeled as its opposite in one of them.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

The Local Italy — a reader in Piedmont describes being stopped mid-errand by a neighbor who asked, not kindly, whether she thought she was at the beach, after she wore flip-flops into town; she stopped wearing them in public within the year.

TalesMag Real Post Report, Rome — a long-serving foreign resident notes that well-dressed people are handled noticeably better at Italian government offices and banks, a pattern consistent enough that locals plan their outfits around bureaucratic errands specifically.

GoOverseas Q&A, Amsterdam — a visiting student warns that sweatpants are an instant tourist tell in the city, and that the safer wardrobe for blending in is jeans, corduroys, and muted neutrals, not athleisure.

DutchReview reader comments — in a recurring debate over shorts at the office, one commenter dismisses them outright as "a piece of clothing for camping," while another insists the stigma is purely a cultural holdover with nothing to do with how anyone actually performs at work.

r/Netherlands — a recurring pattern described across several expat threads, though not tied to one verified post, involves newcomers arriving in a blazer on day one and being quietly, kindly told that they've overdressed for a team that values looking like you didn't try too hard.

Conclusion

If you are choosing between these two on fashion grounds alone, choose based on which kind of judgment you'd rather live under. Italy will judge your effort — your shoes, your ironing, your willingness to treat a bank visit like an occasion. The Netherlands will judge your restraint — your willingness to blend into a visual culture where trying too hard is its own faux pas. Both are forms of conformity. Only one of them lets you wear the same jacket for a decade and call it a virtue.

If a friend asked me over a drink, I'd say: pack fewer, better clothes for Italy and buy a good coat when you land; pack almost nothing special for the Netherlands and buy a bike instead, because nobody there is looking at your shoes, they're checking whether you can keep up on the cycle path.