Suit Optional: Why Australia and the Netherlands Both Ditched Formalwear, For Entirely Different Reasons

🇦🇺 Australia · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In the June quarter of 2025, precisely 0.41 percent of Australian job advertisements bothered to mention a relaxed dress code — a figure that undersells the reality, since most of the country's open-plan offices never needed the memo in the first place (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2025). In the Netherlands, no equivalent statistic exists, because nobody thought to measure it: Dutch offices have simply never required a policy document to explain that the CEO might turn up in a sweater. Both countries have quietly retired the suit as the default workplace uniform. The interesting part is that they arrived at the same wardrobe from opposite philosophical directions.

Do's & Don'ts

🇦🇺 Australia

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Australia

Australia's dress code has been loosening for years, and Indeed Hiring Lab's 2025 analysis of job postings puts a number on it: mentions of "casual dress," "smart casual," or "dress for your day" have trended upward for seven straight years, interrupted only by a brief dip. The shift correlates tightly with remote work — postings for high-remote-share occupations are 3.2 times more likely to flag relaxed dress than those in the office five days a week — and with generational turnover, as Millennials and Gen Z move into positions where they set the norms rather than follow them (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2025). Geography plays its own role: the ACT leads the country at 0.9 percent of postings mentioning casual dress, Queensland and New South Wales follow at 0.5 percent, and the Northern Territory recorded not a single mention in the June quarter — less a formality holdout than an acknowledgment that a suit in Darwin humidity is a self-inflicted dry-cleaning bill.

What's counterintuitive is where the loosening has landed hardest. Insurance postings mention casual dress in 11.6 percent of cases — roughly eight points ahead of any other category — with legal (3.6 percent), accounting (2.9 percent), and banking and finance (1.8 percent) following behind it, sectors not traditionally associated with letting their hair down (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2025). None of this is unregulated drift, either: Australian employers retain a clear legal right to set dress codes, provided they relate to the nature of the work, apply consistently, avoid unlawful discrimination, and accommodate genuine religious, cultural, or medical needs (Citation Group). Casual, in other words, is a company decision, not an employee default — it just happens that more companies are choosing it.

Netherlands

The Dutch approach starts from a different premise entirely. Where Australian informality is opt-in and industry-dependent, Dutch informality is structural, and it runs in reverse: the higher a person's rank, the more casually they're permitted to dress. It's not unusual to find junior sales staff in suits while the boss wears jeans and a sweater — a function of an egalitarian culture in which successful executives are expected to work at looking ordinary rather than exceptional (World Business Culture; Expatica Netherlands). Sector still matters — banking and law hold the line on formal attire, while IT, entertainment, and most start-ups treat open-necked shirts and jeans as the ceiling, not the floor — but the underlying logic, that clothing shouldn't signal power, is close to universal.

Hofstede Insights records Australia and the Netherlands as near-identical on power distance, both scoring 38, a low figure that in each country translates into accessible, informally-communicating management. The divergence shows up elsewhere: Australia's high indulgence score (71) suggests casual dress functions mainly as comfort and self-expression, while the Netherlands' pronounced emphasis on collaboration and consensus channels the same instinct into something closer to an anti-hierarchy statement (Hofstede Insights). The practical result is a workplace where colleagues will tell you, directly and without much cushioning, if your outfit has missed the brief — feedback culture extending, unbothered, to wardrobe (iamexpat.nl).

The Reckoning

Put the two side by side and the paradox sharpens. Australia's casualness is a market choice — employers advertise it, job seekers select for it, and it can be reversed for a client pitch without anyone reading much into the wardrobe change. Dutch casualness is closer to an ideology: dressing down is not a perk offered by the company but a value performed by the individual, and dressing up, especially above your manager, risks being read as a bid for status in a culture that actively discourages one. An Australian in a sharp suit on a Tuesday is simply prepared for a 2pm client call. A Dutch executive in the same suit on the same day is making an unintentional statement about not having quite absorbed the office.

The other reversal is who ends up more formal in practice. Because Australian formality survives selectively in finance, law, and accounting — and because those same sectors are, per Indeed's data, the ones dressing down fastest — the country is arguably converging toward the Dutch model from the top rather than starting there. The Netherlands, meanwhile, never had a suit-and-tie mainstream to dismantle outside a handful of conservative sectors; it built its casualness into the culture's operating system rather than bolting it on as a recruitment tactic.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora respondent, on Dutch women's office style — describes the everyday standard as sneakers, well-cut jeans, and a blouse, with tailored trouser suits reserved mostly for younger professionals and formal occasions, not a daily requirement.

A Blind thread in the Tech Industry channel — notes that in workplaces where casual dress is fully normalized, showing up overdressed reads less as competence and more as someone who hasn't figured out the room yet.

iamexpat.nl, on first-day Dutch office culture — warns new arrivals that colleagues will comment directly on an outfit that misses the mark, and that a desk full of drying raincoats and damp socks from the bike commute is a normal Tuesday, not an emergency.

expat.com, on Sydney's professional environment — describes Casual Fridays as closer to the rule than the exception in many offices, while stressing that "casual" still means well-groomed and neat, not simply comfortable.

A Netherlands-focused Quora answer on general dress norms — advises that when genuinely unsure about a workplace's expectations, it is safer to start slightly overdressed and adjust downward after the first day than the reverse.

Conclusion

The practical advice for either country is nearly identical, which is itself the joke: pack a blazer you'll rarely wear, buy quality basics over statement pieces, and spend your first week watching rather than dressing to impress. The difference is what you're watching for. In Australia, you're reading the room for industry and client exposure — the dress code is a company policy with regional and sectoral exceptions, and it rewards checking rather than assuming. In the Netherlands, you're reading the room for hierarchy in reverse — the most casually dressed person may well be the one who signs off on your project, and matching their formality upward is the actual faux pas. Neither country asks you to buy a suit. Only one of them will quietly judge you for wearing it.