Suits Optional vs. Suits With Birkenstocks Underneath: Dress Codes in the US and Germany

🇺🇸 USA · 🇩🇪 Germany

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

American offices have spent five years dismantling the dress code, to the point where nearly a quarter of workers say they'd take a pay cut for more casual clothing rules. German offices kept the suit — and then, unofficially, made peace with wearing clogs underneath it once you're safely at your desk. Formality in Germany, it turns out, was never really about comfort. It was about what's visible when someone walks into the room.

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Do's & Don'ts

🇺🇸 USA

🇩🇪 Germany

USA: The Fastest-Moving Dress Code in the Developed World

American office formality has been in genuine freefall since the pandemic. Gallup's most recent workplace attire data shows 41% of US workers currently in business casual, 31% in fully casual dress, and 23% in uniforms — with traditional formal business wear now a minority experience across the workforce. Nearly three in four employees say dress code flexibility matters to them, and almost one in four say they'd accept a pay cut in exchange for looser rules, according to Randstad USA's reporting — a striking number for something as ostensibly minor as clothing policy.

The driver is structural as much as generational: fewer in-person meetings and more video calls have genuinely reduced the functional need for traditional office wear, and most Fortune 500 companies have settled into flexible "smart casual" zones rather than maintaining hard rules. What complicates this for newcomers is inconsistency — "business casual" at one American company can mean a blazer over jeans, and at another mean a full suit minus the tie, with no shared national standard to rely on.

Germany: Formality as a Signal, Not a Rulebook

Germany hasn't relaxed nearly as fast, and what looks like rigidity is, per multiple German business etiquette guides including life-in-germany.de and Expatica, really about signaling. Standard expectations remain conservative: dark suits, white shirts, and muted ties for men in client-facing and traditional sectors; equally conservative suits or ensembles for women. Banking centers like Frankfurt run more formally than creative hubs like Berlin, where tech startups and PR agencies have adopted genuinely casual norms — but the default assumption, absent clear signals otherwise, still skews formal.

What's distinctive is the gap between visible formality and private comfort. German office culture treats dress as "a symbol of professionalism," per Workaround's guide to German office etiquette — showing colleagues and clients that you have your life under control — even as many office workers keep a pair of Birkenstock clogs at their desk to slip into once the formal shoes have done their job at the door. The formality of address moves in lockstep: colleagues who've worked side by side for years may still address each other as "Frau" and "Herr" with surnames, a level of interpersonal formality that persists even as the physical dress code loosens at the margins in less client-facing roles.

The Reckoning

The two systems are optimizing for different things entirely. American dress code liberalization is driven by a belief that clothing shouldn't be a barrier to focus or performance — casualness is framed as efficiency. German formality is driven by a belief that visible professionalism is itself a form of respect and self-discipline, independent of whether it affects how the work actually gets done — the suit isn't assumed to make you better at the job, but wearing it signals you take the obligation seriously.

Hofstede Insights data offers a clean lens here: Germany's high Uncertainty Avoidance favors visible, legible signals of order and competence, of which formal dress is a low-cost, high-visibility example, while the US's greater tolerance for ambiguity and individual self-expression supports the current wave of dress code deregulation. Neither culture actually disagrees that clothing communicates something — they disagree about whether that communication should default to formal-until-proven-otherwise, or casual-until-proven-otherwise.

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The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone new to Germany asked whether women are "really" expected to dress up for work, and respondents clarified that expectations vary sharply by employer and industry — one described dressing sharply for two years at a Frankfurt bank before switching to a tech role where jeans were completely normal, with no in-between adjustment period.

teamblind.com — A new hire asking how formal to dress on their first day received the consistent advice to lean formal initially and dial back once the actual office norm became clear, with several posters noting that being overdressed on day one costs nothing socially, while being underdressed is remembered longer than it should be.

The Local Germany — A piece on common expat social blunders in Germany noted that the persistence of formal address (Frau/Herr, surnames) alongside a still-conservative dress code catches many newcomers off guard, especially those arriving from workplaces where first names and casual dress had long since become the unquestioned default.

Quora — A contributor describing German business etiquette mentioned that while there's no formally written dress code at most companies, the safest strategy for a first job interview is to wear roughly what you'd expect to wear on the actual job — meaning a full suit for a bank interview, but something considerably more casual for a startup interview in the same city.

Conclusion

If you're moving to the US, expect to spend your first weeks calibrating what "business casual" specifically means at your new employer, because the national default has genuinely dissolved. If you're moving to Germany, over-dress until you've clearly observed otherwise, keep the formal address going as long as your colleagues do, and don't read the eventual Birkenstocks-under-the-desk moment as a contradiction — it's simply where the formality was never really required to reach. The line I'd give a friend: in America, ask what to wear; in Germany, just wear the suit and watch what happens to your shoes once you're actually at your desk.