Office Jeans

Men’s Work Fashion: Office Jeans

Jeans might be ubiquitous in men’s fashion as the go-to casual trouser, but they can work just as well in the office as they do outside it. Of course, not every style of jeans can be worn with your workplace neckties and suit jackets. Once you learn how to choose them right, though, jeans in the office make for a potently contemporary and fresh statement. Here are the qualifications for the white-collar jean.

Darker is Better
Office neckties come in patterned primary colors. Office shirts come in white and pastels. Office shoes and belts come in black or brown. Men’s fashion has a fairly defined set of acceptable colors for the workplace, and jeans at the office are no exception.

Work-formal jeans are as dark as you can go. This doesn’t exactly eliminate all choices; gray, midnight blue and black denims are still distinct from each other in subtle ways, and can look very different depending on the lighting. Just because you have to stick to a darker and more sober palette doesn’t mean that your rotation options are limited. There’s a wide spectrum of dark washes and colors for you to mix and match.

To emphasize the coloration of your jeans and make the denim sleight-of-style subtler, avoid matching the shirt and necktie to your jeans. That is, if you’re wearing dark blue denims, stay away from the pastel blue shirt or the navy tie.

Straight and Fitted
As you might have noticed by now, formal men’s fashion is all about the ‘classic’ cuts and traditional silhouettes. For denim pants, that automatically means straight fit jeans. They don’t have to be perfectly linear, but you can’t have the flare of a boot cut or the tightness of a skinny jean either.

You’ll also want something that hits you at your natural waist, which should be about a couple of inches below your bellybutton. This is to differentiate it from casual jeans, which some guys wear low waist-style at the hips. The latter isn’t a look that every guy can pull off, and there’s the risk of seeming like you dressed up for the club, not work.

Bagging and sagging are no-no’s for work slacks, just as they are unacceptable in jeans. Ill-fitting denims are more a matter of looking neat and put-together than they are about formalness and dress codes; they look sloppy even when worn in a casual setting. Avoid them like the plague and pleather pants.

Clean and Presentable
Most men have a pair or two of those old jeans that have gotten frayed and damaged over the years but are comfortable as hell to wear. And while comfort might trump fashion on the question of whether to keep or discard those jeans, propriety takes priority when you start talking about wearing them to the office.

No matter how comfortable those beat-up decade-old jeans are, there’s no question about it: you can’t wear them to work. Office dress codes might not require on-trend style or the utmost formalness, but they do require a reasonable minimum of presentability. That means pants – slacks or jeans – that aren’t frayed, and without rips or holes.

Some guys also wear jeans twice before washing, reasoning that the hardy fabric should be able to withstand more before requiring cleaning. While denim is definitely durable, dirty jeans isn’t something you’d want to wear to work. The ideal case is to wash them like you would your regular everyday office slacks. If you’re going to treat jeans like office pants, you may as well go all the way.

Other Readings From Our Blog You Might Like:
Guide to Denim Jeans
Mens Smart Casual Attire

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