One Country Debates Whether Flip-Flops Are Office-Appropriate. The Other Considers Short Sleeves With a Tie a Crime.

🇸🇮 Slovenia · 🇦🇺 Australia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

An Australian fashion outlet recently ran an entire feature asking whether thongs — flip-flops, not underwear, for anyone reading literally — count as acceptable office wear, and got genuinely split answers from young professionals (Fashion Journal). Meanwhile, a Slovenian image consultant's most pointed fashion complaint about local men isn't about footwear casualness at all; it's about pairing a short-sleeved shirt with a tie, which she flatly calls a "ruined" look reserved only for people in uniform (RTV Slovenija). Two very different thresholds for what counts as a fashion crime, and neither one is really about the clothes — it's about how seriously each culture takes the boundary between "dressed" and "undressed for the occasion."

Do's & Don'ts

🇸🇮 Slovenia

🇦🇺 Australia

Slovenia

Slovenian dress culture favors restraint and quality over flash, according to image consultant Lea Pisani: locals "do not tend to wear daring clothing with bold prints, patterns and colours," in deliberate contrast to neighboring Italy, even as they admire Italian creativity from a respectful distance (RTV Slovenija). The country's menswear has also drifted away from formality — ties are now mostly a leadership signal rather than an everyday expectation — but that loosening has limits Pisani is happy to name specifically: a short-sleeved shirt is, in her words, a "ruined" shirt, and pairing one with a tie is acceptable only if you're in uniform.

There's a quieter, more structural story underneath the individual style commentary. Ljubljana Fashion Week has spent roughly a decade building what organizers describe as a reputation as "a burgeoning hub for sustainable fashion," with designers like Nika Ravnik building entire collections from reclaimed textile remnants using zero-waste, one-size-fits-all principles, and heritage studios like Draž Studio (active since 1994) blending traditional craft with contemporary design. The throughline from Pisani's individual-style caution to the city's fashion-week branding is consistent: Slovenian fashion culture, formal and otherwise, is oriented around deliberateness and quality rather than volume or bold statement.

Australia

Australian workplace dress has been on a clear, measurable slide toward casual for roughly seven straight years. In the June 2025 quarter, 0.41% of job postings explicitly mentioned relaxed dress standards — a small-sounding number that masks real variation: casual dress mentions run about 3.2 times more common in high-remote occupations than in medium-remote ones, and are almost nonexistent in low-remote roles (Indeed Hiring Lab). Some of the biggest casual-dress mentions come from sectors you wouldn't expect — insurance postings mention it in 11.6% of listings, well above legal (3.6%) or accounting (2.9%) — while regional variation is real too: the ACT leads at 0.9% of postings, the Northern Territory had zero mentions in the same quarter.

Nowhere is the genuine cultural split clearer than in the long-running debate over thongs as workwear. Young professionals quoted by Fashion Journal landed all over the map: Niamh, 24, thinks they're fine "if it's done tastefully," paired with something like capri pants; Kylie, 24, agrees for her relaxed workplace as long as it's "an elevated thong choice"; but Ash, 26, who works in a school, called it "a big no," citing closed-toe safety needs around children; Frederica, 27, in fashion marketing, finds them too casual for the office without calling it "a bad look"; and Heleana, 26, offered the simplest verdict of all: "I say free the dogs!"

The Reckoning

The real contrast isn't formal-versus-casual in the abstract — both countries have genuinely casual office cultures by global standards. It's where each one draws its actual line. Slovenia polices taste and construction: a short-sleeved shirt with a tie is a disqualifying combination because it signals carelessness about getting the details right, even within an otherwise relaxed dress code. Australia polices footwear and occasion-appropriateness: the debate isn't about formality at all, it's about whether a specific casual item (thongs) crosses from "relaxed" into "didn't think about work today," and reasonable people there genuinely disagree.

For an incoming employee, that means calibrating different instincts. In Slovenia, lean toward understated and well-constructed even when the dress code says casual — sloppy execution is the actual sin. In Australia, the dress code itself might tell you less than your specific industry's job postings and your remote-work status will — a tech or insurance job with high remote flexibility will tolerate far more than a client-facing, fully on-site role in the same city.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Fashion Journal (Australia, named reader voices) — Ash, 26, who works in a school, was unequivocal about thongs at work: "I work in a school so it's a big no," citing the practical safety logic of closed-toe shoes around children rather than any aesthetic objection.

Fashion Journal (Australia, named reader voices) — Heleana, 26, who works in media, offered the opposite take with no hedging at all: "I say free the dogs!" — a one-line endorsement of thongs that several of her peers quoted alongside her stopped short of fully matching.

Fashion Journal (Australia, named reader voices) — Frederica, 27, in fashion marketing, drew a more personal-preference line rather than a moral one: she avoids thongs at the office because she finds them too casual, while adding plainly, "I don't think it's a bad look or anything" — disagreement without judgment.

RTV Slovenija (named expert account, image consultant Lea Pisani) — Asked to characterize men's everyday dress nationally, Pisani singled out one specific combination as the clearest marker of a style failure: a short-sleeved shirt, which she calls a "ruined" shirt once the sleeves are gone, worn with a tie — acceptable, in her framing, only for people actually in uniform.

A note on sourcing: Reddit, Quora, and Internations did not return fetchable first-person threads for this specific pairing this run; the voices above were sourced from named Fashion Journal reader accounts and a named RTV Slovenija expert interview instead.

Conclusion

If you want a workplace where the dress code is relaxed but the unspoken quality bar is quietly strict, Slovenia will reward careful, understated choices and quietly judge a sloppy short-sleeve-and-tie combination more than it will judge casualness itself. If you want a workplace where the actual debate is happening in real time — where thongs are either totally fine or a professional non-starter depending entirely on who you ask — Australia will hand you that debate on your first day and let you pick a side. Either way, nobody's asking you to wear a suit. They're just asking you to get the details right, whatever "right" happens to mean locally.