Suits You, Sir: How America Went Casual and Korea Went Casual-ish

🇺🇸 USA · 🇰🇷 South Korea

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In the United States, the necktie has become a costume item, worn mainly by men attending weddings, funerals, and depositions. Only 3% of American workers now say they wear a suit to the office, down from 7% in 2019, according to Gallup — a decline steep enough that dry cleaners could plausibly file for disaster relief. In South Korea, the suit is also dying, but more decorously: sales of men's formalwear have fallen by nearly half since 2011, per the Korea Federation of Textile Industries, even as the definition of "acceptable" office wear has quietly tightened around a different axis entirely — not formality, but grooming. Two countries, two funerals for the suit, two very different eulogies. The American one is a shrug. The Korean one comes with a skincare routine.

--- ### Do's & Don'ts

🇺🇸 USA

🇰🇷 South Korea

USA

The American workplace has not so much relaxed its dress code as abandoned the concept of having one. Monster's 2025 poll found 43% of workers hadn't worked under a dress code at all in the past year, and among those who had, nearly two-thirds described it as business casual rather than anything stricter. Gallup's longer trend line tells the same story with more drama: business professional attire, worn by a meaningful share of the workforce a generation ago, has cratered to 3%, while "casual street clothes" — Gallup's polite term for jeans and T-shirts — holds steady at 31%. The pandemic gets much of the credit, or blame, depending on your relationship with blazers; workers who ever telecommuted are more than twice as likely to report dressing business casual than those who never did.

What's notable is how little this seems to bother anyone in charge. Hiring managers surveyed by Monster were markedly less likely than five years ago to say dress code adherence mattered for job performance — down to under a third from roughly half. Meanwhile 44% of workers said they'd consider switching jobs over dress code alone, turning a wardrobe question into a retention metric HR departments now track. The upshot for an incoming employee: American workplace fashion is now a game of reading the room rather than reading a rulebook, and the room, increasingly, is wearing sneakers.

South Korea

Korea's dress code has undergone its own dramatic loosening — but the story underneath it is less about comfort than about what replaced formality as the marker of professionalism. As the Korea JoongAng Daily documented, the share of Korean men wearing suits to work has collapsed from 85% in the late 1990s to a rarity today, with major firms like Samsung, LG, and CJ formally rolling back suit requirements between 2000 and 2008, a shift the pandemic then cemented. One HR officer at a materials company told the paper that his boss once suggested he swap dress shoes for sneakers because he "looked uncomfortable" — a sentence almost unthinkable in a Korean office fifteen years ago.

But casualness in Korea has a ceiling that doesn't exist in the same way in the U.S., and that ceiling is appearance itself. Hofstede Insights scores South Korea at 18 on individualism versus the United States' 91 — a structural difference that helps explain why Korean workplace norms, even relaxed ones, still track group expectations more than individual comfort. Layered onto that is a well-documented lookism problem: a 2020 Gallup Korea poll found nine in ten Koreans agree "looks are important in life," and job applicants routinely attach photos to résumés, with roughly 40% in one survey reporting appearance-based hiring discrimination. So the suit disappeared, but the underlying scrutiny didn't — it just moved from tailoring to grooming, skin, and the specific cut of a blazer kept ready at your desk.

The Reckoning

Here is the head-to-head that the tourism brochures skip: American casualness is fundamentally permissive — it expands what you're allowed to wear and rarely punishes you for choosing more comfort over more polish. Korean casualness is fundamentally substitutive — it swaps one set of demanding standards (suits) for another (grooming, brand-consciousness, department-specific formality) rather than removing the demand altogether. An American in jeans is invisible. A Korean office worker in the "wrong" casual — the sneakers instead of the SPA-brand slacks, the shoulder showing instead of the discreet blazer — is still being evaluated, just against a rubric that no longer has a name like "business formal."

The counterintuitive twist is that Korea, on paper the more formal culture, now allows more physical comfort in fabric — shorts and sandals during summer "Cool Biz" initiatives that would raise eyebrows in most American corporate offices even in a heat wave — while enforcing a stricter, less negotiable standard of overall polish. America inverted this: fabric got dramatically more casual, but the underlying judgment of "does this person look competent" softened right along with it, to the point that hiring managers now say they barely track it.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

r/korea — A poster described a British-Korean woman who kept getting rejected from interviews for backend, appearance-irrelevant roles, and eventually concluded her looks were the deciding factor; she ultimately gave up and moved back to the UK.

r/korea — A foreign worker described colleagues switching to Korean and laughing at the lunch table, calling the broader office culture "toxic and deadly" despite the relaxed dress code on paper.

Quora — In answer to "What should I wear in South Korea," a respondent's top tip for new arrivals was to keep a blazer at your desk at all times: you won't wear it daily, but "business casual" at a Korean company still usually means having one ready without notice.

Blind — In a thread on relocating to Korea with an expat package, one commenter warned that overworking is common "despite abysmal pay," describing a corporate culture so hierarchical that you're "not allowed to clock out before your manager."

Korea JoongAng Daily interview — An HR officer named Roh Hee-jae recalled that his own boss once told him to swap his dress shoes for sneakers on his first week, saying he looked visibly uncomfortable — a small moment that reframed how relaxed the new normal actually was.

Conclusion

If you're choosing between these two postings based on wardrobe budget alone, the honest math favors the United States: fewer formal pieces required, less pressure to keep a blazer permanently on standby, and hiring managers who increasingly can't be bothered to enforce a dress code at all. But wardrobe budget is the wrong metric. What actually determines how exhausting your first year abroad will be is whether you're operating under a permissive system that mostly leaves you alone, or a substitutive one that keeps evaluating you by different rules it never quite writes down. Korea's relaxed dress code is real, but it didn't remove judgment — it moved it into grooming, hierarchy, and the unspoken question of whether your casual reads as intentional or careless.

So if a friend asked me over drinks: take the U.S. posting if what you want is to disappear into the crowd in cargo pants and never think about it again. Take the Korea posting if you don't mind being evaluated on presentation indefinitely — just budget for a very good blazer, and never, ever let your boss see you in it before he decides you should switch to sneakers.