The Suit Is Optional, the Opinion Isn't: Colombia and the Netherlands Fight About Pants

🇨🇴 Colombia · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Colombia's own Foreign Ministry tried to formalize a dress code for diplomats in 2023 and got accused in the Senate of erasing people's identities. The Netherlands, meanwhile, has spent years debating — in national newspapers, with real surveys — whether a grown adult is allowed to wear shorts to the office. Neither country has solved the pants question. Both have made it a surprisingly public fight.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇴 Colombia

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Colombia: One Country, At Least Three Dress Codes

The honest answer to "how formal is Colombian business dress" depends entirely on which Colombia you mean. A DNA Human Capital survey covered by Forbes Colombia found 36% of Colombian executives now prefer casual attire — the highest share among five major Latin American economies surveyed (Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile) — while traditional sectors (banking, investment, law, consulting) still run on suits and ties as a matter of course, and marketing, media, and tech sit at the most informal end. One executive quoted in the piece linked casual dress directly to a more "horizontal," less hierarchical company culture, which tracks with Hofstede Insights scoring Colombia at a notably high 67 on power distance — a number that makes the correlation between flatter structures and looser dress codes feel less like coincidence and more like the same underlying shift showing up twice.

The political layer adds genuine texture. In 2023, Colombia's Foreign Ministry issued formal dress guidance for diplomats favouring "business formal" attire, complete with specific recommendations for women (tailored suits, discreet makeup, neutral colours). It landed badly: Senator María José Pizarro argued the code made "new aesthetics and identities invisible," and critics pointed out that President Gustavo Petro, Vice President Francia Márquez, and a cabinet minister previously photographed in sneakers didn't follow it themselves. Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva ultimately distanced himself from his own ministry's guidance, invoking the constitutional right to "free development of personality." None of that resolved what any individual private employer actually expects — which is still, per multiple long-term residents, a genuinely case-by-case question.

The Netherlands: Casual by Default, Contested at the Margins

Dutch workplace dress defaults casual — t-shirts and jeans outside the office, business casual inside it — but corporate and sector exceptions are real, and the exact boundary gets litigated with startling seriousness. DutchNews.nl's coverage of office dress etiquette and a widely discussed shorts-at-the-office debate on DutchReview (drawing on NU.nl reader comments) shows actual Dutch people disagreeing with each other: one reader would tolerate "smart" shorts but not sporty ones, another called the entire stigma around men's bare legs "a culture thing" that should simply end, and a third dismissed shorts outright as "a piece of clothing for camping." A gendered subplot runs underneath it too — one commenter specifically tied the stigma to an unequal grooming standard between men and women's legwear.

Hofstede Insights scores the Netherlands at a striking 14 on masculinity — one of the lowest in the world — a number that correlates with exactly this kind of workplace: modest, non-competitive, egalitarian rather than status-signalling through clothing. Blind's Adyen-Amsterdam thread captures the texture well: one self-identified employee described colleagues who "don't take themselves so serious," a relaxed register that shows up as much in dress as in hierarchy. The cultural trap sits at the edges, though — a GoOverseas Q&A respondent, an international student in Amsterdam, said giving up sweatpants was his single biggest wardrobe adjustment, since "most people that wear sweatpants are labeled as a tourist instantly."

Generational divergence cuts across both countries in a similar shape, worth naming on its own. In Colombia, the Forbes-reported survey explicitly linked casual dress to younger leadership and newer sectors, while traditional industries retain older hierarchies and suits as a visible marker of that seniority. In the Netherlands, the same split shows up by age rather than sector — the GoOverseas respondent noted older Dutch workers dress more formally almost regardless of industry, while younger colleagues converge on jeans and simple prints whatever the company does. In both places, dress code is quietly doing double duty as a generational signal, not just a cultural or sectoral one — which is worth knowing before you read too much into a single office's dress norm as "the" national standard, especially if your own workplace skews unusually young or unusually senior compared to the broader local market.

The Reckoning

The real irony is which country's formality is actually contested. Colombia looks, on net survey numbers, more casual than its reputation suggests — but its political class just had a very public fight about formal dress rules nobody in government actually follows. The Netherlands looks, on reputation, uniformly relaxed — but ordinary Dutch people are still visibly split on where "relaxed" stops, down to the inseam.

Both countries converge on the same practical truth: national stereotypes about formality say less than your specific sector, your specific office's generational mix, and — in the Netherlands' case — apparently your specific opinion on shorts.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind — An employee at a Dutch fintech's Amsterdam office described the company culture as "the best," emphasizing that colleagues "don't take themselves so serious" — a relaxed register they tied directly to how people dress and interact day to day, not just to benefits or pay.

TalesMag Real Post Report (Bogota) — One respondent, posting in 2018, said their embassy-adjacent workplace expected business dress and that their spouse wore a suit and tie daily, adding plainly, "we haven't had to wear formal dress for anything yet" outside that one context — a reminder that "Colombia's dress code" can mean two completely different wardrobes depending on which job you actually have.

Expat.com (Colombia forum) — A long-term business contributor, writing from direct experience "doing business in many types of companies in Colombia," advised newcomers to pay close attention to first impressions in professional settings specifically because the formal/casual line shifts so much by sector and region.

GoOverseas Q&A — An international student in Amsterdam said his biggest wardrobe adjustment moving there wasn't acquiring new formal wear but giving up sweatpants entirely, since casual dress has its own unspoken ceiling and "most people that wear sweatpants are labeled as a tourist instantly."

On Quora specifically: repeated targeted searches for first-person Quora accounts covering this pairing returned no fetchable results, a recurring limitation with this platform worth disclosing honestly here rather than inventing a quote to fill the slot.

Conclusion

If you're trying to pack a suitcase based on national reputation alone, you'll pack wrong in both directions. Colombia's casual-leaning survey numbers coexist with sectors, cities, and specific offices that still expect a tie every day; the Netherlands' famously relaxed reputation coexists with a real, ongoing, nationally debated line between "acceptably casual" and "tourist."

My honest advice to a friend packing for either move: bring one genuinely formal outfit no matter which country you're headed to, watch what your actual new colleagues wear in week one before buying anything else, and in the Netherlands specifically — just leave the sweatpants at home. Nobody there is going to tell you directly. They'll just quietly know.