Suits in 30-Degree Heat vs. Sandals in the Boardroom: Kenya and Israel

🇰🇪 Kenya · 🇮🇱 Israel

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Nairobi sits almost on the equator and its offices still run on dark, well-fitted suits as the default professional uniform. Tel Aviv sits in a genuine desert climate and its most senior engineers show up to client meetings in t-shirts and sandals. Neither country dresses for its weather. Both dress, precisely, for what their workplace hierarchy needs you to believe about them.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇪 Kenya

🇮🇱 Israel

Kenya's formality is a direct legacy of a colonial-era administrative culture layered onto a Hofstede profile that still runs high on both power distance (70) and masculinity (60) — a combination that reads clearly in how much dress communicates rank and seriousness. Guides on Kenyan business etiquette are unanimous: suits, ties, and polished shoes for men; tailored dresses or suits in navy, grey, or black for women; necklines and hemlines kept conservative regardless of the heat. Even Nairobi's reputation as East Africa's more "progressive" business hub only stretches the rules to business casual on Friday — and even then, guides advise treating "casual" as a step above jeans, not an invitation to them. One expat community Q&A on relocating to Nairobi captured the contradiction succinctly: dark formal suits remain standard practice despite temperatures that make them genuinely uncomfortable, because in Kenyan business culture, visible formality still functions as a stand-in for competence and respect.

Israel inverts nearly every one of those signals. Hofstede's power distance score for Israel sits at just 2 — practically the lowest ever recorded on the index — reflecting a business culture built around flat access to leadership and a discomfort with performed hierarchy of any kind, dress included. "Business casual" barely exists as a distinct category in Israeli offices because casual is simply the default: chinos or jeans, polos or button-downs, sandals in summer, and jackets or ties reserved almost exclusively for executive-level external meetings. The one real exception is the first meeting with a new counterpart, where dressing up is a genuine courtesy — after which it's not just acceptable but expected to relax back into the norm. Titles matter far less than what someone can actually build or ship, and Israel's globally disproportionate tech sector reflects that: dress functions as camouflage for informality, not a signal of who's actually in charge.

What trips up transplants in both directions is mistaking the dress code for the whole culture. A Kenyan professional arriving in Tel Aviv can misread casual dress as casual standards, when Israeli tech culture is simultaneously among the most direct, rigorous, and blunt in the world — Israel's uncertainty avoidance score of 81 shows up as intense scrutiny of ideas and results, dressed, quite literally, as if none of it mattered. An Israeli professional arriving in Nairobi can misread the suit as empty formality, when it's doing real communicative work in a higher-power-distance culture where visible respect for hierarchy is part of how trust gets built in the first place.

The Reckoning. Dress code, in both countries, is best read as a symptom rather than the disease — a visible proxy for how each culture wants authority to be earned and displayed. Kenya's formality signals that hierarchy is real and worth performing respect for, even at real physical discomfort. Israel's informality signals that hierarchy is something to be actively minimized, even in industries and companies where enormous amounts of actual power are concentrated in very few hands. Judge either country by its dress code alone and you'll get the seriousness of the workplace exactly backwards.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

TeamBlind — A recurring thread on tech-industry dress codes noted that even at major global tech employers, genuinely enforced formal or semi-formal dress requirements are now rare enough to be notable when they exist, treating strict dress codes as the exception that needs explaining rather than the default.

TimeOut Israel — A piece cataloguing ordinary quirks of the Israeli workplace listed the near-total absence of dress code enforcement alongside other unusual norms, framing extreme dress informality — even at senior levels — as simply unremarkable rather than a deliberate statement.

Substack (vydolob.substack.com, "Fashion Notes From Tel Aviv") — A newsletter tracking Tel Aviv style culture observed that office dress in the city reads more like weekend dress everywhere else, and that visibly "put together" attire in a business setting can actually read as slightly try-hard rather than professional.

TalesMag (U.S. State Department-affiliated expat community Q&A) — A contributor describing daily life in Nairobi noted, with some resignation, that dark formal suits remain the norm for business meetings despite consistently warm weather, advising newcomers to simply accept the discomfort as the cost of being taken seriously.

Quora — A thread on workplace dress code reactions included an account of a professional surprised, on a first visit to an Israeli tech office, by how uniformly casual senior staff dressed compared to expectations set by more formal work environments elsewhere — with seniority signaled entirely through who spoke and decided, not what anyone wore.

Conclusion

If you're moving to Nairobi, over-invest in formal wardrobe basics before you land — the discomfort is real, but so is the credibility it buys you in a hierarchy-conscious culture. If you're moving to Tel Aviv, resist the urge to keep dressing up after your first meeting — persistent formality there reads less as respect and more as a strange kind of distance.

The version I'd give a friend: in Kenya, dress for the job you want people to believe you already have. In Israel, dress like the job doesn't matter at all — and then watch how seriously everyone still takes the work.