What To Wear When Your New Office Has No Written Dress Code, Only Opinions
Priya MehtaOctober 9, 2026 5 min read
🇵🇰 Pakistan · 🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates
*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
Pakistan will tell you exactly what formality looks like and then quietly let the boss override it by mood. The UAE will tell you almost nothing official and then let sixty strangers on a newspaper's comments page tell you everything, loudly, in contradictory detail. A 2018 Gulf News reader poll on office attire found 60% of respondents had never actually been offended by a colleague's clothing, which is either reassuring or a sign that nobody in Dubai has agreed on the rules in the first place. Pack conservatively for both. Pack differently for each.
Do's & Don'ts
🇵🇰 Pakistan
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Default to conservative and more formal than you think necessary — multiple long-serving expats describe Pakistani norms as stricter than American ones | Assume a casual Western office culture; even relaxed workplaces expect staff who deal with the public to dress professionally |
| Keep a shalwar kameez or traditional option in rotation; it reads as entirely appropriate business dress, not a downgrade from a suit | Wear shorts or sleeveless tops outside expat-compound settings, for any gender |
| Carry a shawl or scarf if you're a woman attending public-facing meetings | Expect a uniform policy across companies; dress varies significantly by specific boss and department, not just industry |
| Match the room — coat and tie for client meetings even if the daily office code is relaxed | Treat formality as fixed once you've learned it; it can shift meeting to meeting based on who's attending |
| Watch what long-tenured local colleagues wear on a normal Tuesday as your actual benchmark | Over-rely on an employee handbook; day-to-day norms are set by section culture more than written policy |
🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Default to business attire unless you're explicitly told business casual is acceptable | Wear sleeveless tops, very short skirts, or low-slung trousers around Emirati or government-linked clients |
| Build a small, versatile wardrobe rather than a large one — Dubai's own style guides push "minimal but considered" over variety | Wear a suit every single day by default; many offices run smart-casual and overdressing reads as try-hard, not professional |
| Keep an abaya on hand if client work touches Saudi Arabia or similarly conservative settings, even where it isn't strictly required | Assume the dress code is uniform across the city; it varies sharply between finance/government-adjacent offices and creative or startup workplaces |
| Dress more conservatively during Ramadan as a visible sign of respect, even in otherwise liberal offices | Judge colleagues' clothing by your home country's norms; a genuinely multinational office usually polices less, not more |
| Keep one outfit scrupulously clean and pressed rather than many average ones — hygiene comes up as often as modesty in local etiquette guidance | Show up in "jazzy shirts and shorts," which multiple local commentators flag as the most common and most noticed etiquette failure |
Pakistan
Formality in a Pakistani office is real, but it isn't written down the way a Western handbook would write it. Long-posted expatriates in Islamabad and Karachi describe dress as noticeably more conservative and formal than American norms by default, with the specific line moving depending on your boss, your department, and who's in the room that day (talesmag.com). A junior staffer dealing only with internal colleagues might wear business casual all week; the moment a client or senior visitor appears, out comes the coat and tie, or the sharpest shalwar kameez in the closet — and traditional dress genuinely counts as formal business attire here, not a fallback from it.
What trips up newcomers is treating this as a fixed code to memorize once. It isn't. One expat accurately summarized the whole system as depending "on the boss and section" rather than company-wide policy, which means the actual rulebook is whoever is senior to you in the room (talesmag.com). Women in public-facing or client-adjacent roles are generally advised to carry a shawl, less as a legal requirement than as a social lubricant that heads off a dozen small frictions before they start.
United Arab Emirates
The UAE's dress culture runs on the opposite problem: too much opinion, not enough official guidance. A 2018 Gulf News feature gathering reader views found a call centre agent warning that party wear "gives the wrong impression," an accountant objecting to "flashy or gaudy clothes," and an executive secretary flagging open shirt buttons and above-the-knee skirts — three different professions, three overlapping but not identical standards, none of them written into law (gulfnews.com). Khaleej Times' own style guidance leans the other way, warning new arrivals against wearing a suit every single day and advising they "dress according to company culture" instead, since a finance office and a Dubai startup can have almost nothing in common (khaleejtimes.com).
The Morning Brief
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The one real constant is client-facing modesty around government and Emirati counterparts: cover shoulders and knees, skip sleeveless tops, and keep an abaya on standby if your work touches Saudi Arabia, where the garment is no longer legally mandatory but social expectation hasn't fully caught up to the law (fishbowlapp.com). Inside a genuinely multinational office, though, multiple accounts converge on the same point — people mostly don't police each other's clothing nearly as much as outsiders expect.
The Reckoning
Hofstede Insights doesn't publish an individual UAE score — the Emirates are measured only as part of the broader "Arab World" cluster, which runs high on power distance (80) and low on individualism (38). Pakistan's individually published numbers land in a similar neighborhood: power distance 55, individualism just 14, among the lowest in the world. Both cultures are intensely hierarchical and group-oriented, which should, in theory, make their dress codes equally legible. It doesn't, because Pakistan's hierarchy is personal — dress for your specific boss — while the UAE's hierarchy, at least around dress, is diffuse and crowdsourced, a hundred individual opinions standing in for a rule nobody formally wrote.
The practical result: in Pakistan, you can ask one person (your boss, or whoever's most senior nearby) and get a reliable answer. In the UAE, you can ask five people and get five sincere, contradictory answers, and the only way to actually resolve it is to watch the room for a week before you buy anything.
The Part the Brochure Left Out
Gulf News — Sumera Malek, a call centre agent, said party wear "gives the wrong impression" at the office and that "a decent outfit is a must," adding that she keeps her own abaya scrupulously clean rather than wearing the same outfit repeatedly.
Gulf News — Abdul Khader Baig Mirza, an accountant in Sharjah, said he'd find it difficult to work alongside colleagues dressed in "flashy or gaudy clothes at work," arguing that clothing shapes how clients judge competence before anyone speaks.
Fishbowl — An engagement manager advising a colleague relocating from New York City said dress in Dubai is largely flexible day to day, but to wear suits at client sites just as in the US, keep skirts knee-length or slightly shorter, and avoid sleeveless tops specifically around Emirati clients.
TalesMag Real Post Report, Dubai — One long-posted respondent summarized the actual rule as: "Business attire is appropriate at work unless you are specifically told that business casual is acceptable" — the opposite default from many Western offices.
TalesMag Real Post Report, Karachi — A respondent with years in-country put it simply: "Pakistanis dress more conservatively and more formally than Americans," with staff who deal with the public expected to be in suits or formal traditional dress even where the back office is casual.
A note on sourcing: Quora returned no fetchable first-person content for this pairing, and Reddit and Blind searches for Dubai/Pakistan dress-code threads surfaced nothing directly fetchable either. Fishbowl, a verified professional network, was used as the nearest genuine substitute for that category rather than padding the gap with an invented Quora or Blind quote.
Conclusion
If you need one rule to travel with, it's this: in Pakistan, overdress relative to your peers until a specific person tells you otherwise, because the hierarchy that sets the standard is right in front of you. In the UAE, overdress relative to the internet's opinion until the room itself tells you otherwise, because the hierarchy that sets the standard is distributed across a hundred people who've never met each other and don't agree. Pack the shawl either way. And if a friend asked me which is harder to get right on day one, I'd say Pakistan — because in Dubai, at least, everyone agrees the only real sin is looking like you didn't try.
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Photo by Anna Shvets via Pexels
Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.