Doc Martens or a Tailored Kurta: What "Dressing Normal" Actually Means in the Netherlands and India

🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇮🇳 India

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

The Dutch have a saying — "doe maar normaal, dan doe je al gek genoeg," roughly "just act normal, that's already crazy enough" — and it governs closets as thoroughly as conversation. Meanwhile, in 2024 the Bihar state government in India formally instructed staff to stop wearing jeans and T-shirts to work, an instruction that would be unnecessary in a culture less invested in what clothing communicates. Both places care enormously about dress. One expresses that care by refusing to stand out. The other expresses it by dressing precisely for the room you're walking into.

Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇱 Netherlands

🇮🇳 India

The Netherlands treats visible individualism in clothing with mild suspicion. Hofstede Insights scores the country low on masculinity (14) and moderate-low on power distance (38), which together read, on the street, as an aversion to any outfit that signals either status or competitive flair. The Dutch closet leans toward muted colours, durable quality basics, and functional layers built for wind, rain, and a bicycle commute — practicality isn't a fashion compromise here, it's the actual aesthetic. Expatica's guide to Dutch dress culture and multiple style writers converge on the same description: versatile, comfort-first, and quietly expensive rather than loudly branded. The goal isn't invisibility exactly — it's looking deliberately unremarkable, which paradoxically takes its own kind of effort.

India's dress culture runs on context far more than any single national norm, which is itself the point professionals most often miss. World Business Culture and India-Briefing both describe a business landscape where formal, conservative attire is still the default in traditional sectors — banking, law, government — while tech, biosciences, and startups have adopted markedly Western-informal norms, especially in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi. Layered onto this is enormous regional and state-level variation: several Indian state governments, including Bihar and Haryana, have issued explicit bans on jeans and T-shirts in government offices in the past two years, treating casual Western wear as a genuine breach of workplace decorum rather than a style choice. For women, the professional wardrobe has visibly modernised — pantsuits and Western blazers now sit alongside sarees and salwar kameez as equally acceptable business attire in most metros — but the option to dress traditionally remains a live, respected choice, not a fallback.

The Reckoning

The counterintuitive part: the Netherlands, often assumed to be the more liberal, individualist culture, actually enforces a tighter informal dress consensus than India does. Standing out in Amsterdam gets you noticed in a way that reads as awkward, not admired. India, often assumed to have rigid, uniform dress expectations, is in practice a country of wildly different micro-norms stacked by sector, state, and even specific employer — what's mandatory in a Bihar government office would be unremarkable in a Bengaluru startup three states away.

Both countries also use clothing to communicate something Westerners often miss on arrival: restraint as a form of respect. Dutch minimalism signals "I am not asking for more attention than anyone else in this room." Indian formalwear in traditional sectors signals "I understand exactly how seriously this context needs to be taken." Read wrong, either can look like a lack of effort. Read right, both are quietly precise.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone answering "How do Dutch men and women dress casually?" described the default as jeans, a sweater or tee, and white sneakers for almost everyone, adding that trying too hard to look distinctive tends to draw exactly the kind of attention Dutch culture quietly discourages.

Quora — A response to "What should I wear in the Netherlands?" advised prioritising a genuinely waterproof coat and shoes over anything fashionable, noting that the wind makes umbrellas nearly useless and that looking put-together in Dutch weather is less about style than logistics.

Blind — A thread titled "office dress codes have changed" collected a wide range of experiences, with several posters from South Asian offices noting that formality expectations had loosened dramatically in tech roles over the past decade while remaining rigid in finance and government roles at the very same companies.

Blind — Someone asking how to dress for an onsite interview got replies split by industry and geography, with a few noting that erring formal was the safer choice in India even at companies with a famously casual day-to-day dress code, since interviews are treated as a different register entirely.

Conclusion

If you're heading to the Netherlands, buy less than you think you need and buy it well — a good coat and quality basics will outperform anything trend-driven, and restraint reads as fluency, not boredom. If you're heading to India, do not assume your new company's stated dress code is the whole story; ask what your specific team, state, and client-facing exposure actually require, because the range between offices can be enormous. My honest line for a friend over drinks: the Dutch will judge you for standing out, and India will judge you for guessing wrong about which room you're actually in. Both are solvable — just do the homework before the first day, not during it.