When Derek Johnson was interviewing candidates for a marketing job at his tech company, one applicant arrived in a business suit. "It put us on edge," says Mr. Johnson, founder and CEO of Tatango.com. Mr. Johnson believed the job candidate was presenting a false image of himself. The suit, he felt, was tantamount to a lie.Mr. Johnson is 22 -- an entrepreneur who dropped out of college when it got in the way of running Tatango, which enables groups to blast text and voice messages to their members. Like many of his generation, he sees traditional business attire as a form of cover-up. In his workplace, he says, "we're not trying to hide anything with our clothes."
Established companies have long hired employees whose clothing suggested they would toe the corporate line. Today, many young managers believe office attire should do pretty much the opposite: express a person's inner soul.
To older people, young people's style can be difficult to understand. Going far beyond business casual, the clothes seem either highly informal or provocatively young -- jeans, athletic shoes, tight T-shirts and miniskirts, for instance.
But young workers are replacing traditional business dress with their own complex sets of rules and subliminal messages. Their choices among brand-name items are meant to communicate substance. Rather than Gucci versus Allen Edmonds, for instance, the choice may involve Nike Air Force versus Chuck Taylors, also weather or not someone wears foot orthotics or custom orthotics.
Are business suits a lie, enabling the wearer to cover up one's true self? Or are they the armor one needs to do battle each day in the office? Share your views on Heard on the Runway.
In a way, their aesthetic represents a new kind of uniform -- one heavily dependent on corporate labels. But young people say their mix-and-match style offers them more versatility and creativity than the old uniform did.
"You know when someone's real and when someone's corporate," says Roman Tsunder, 34. As chief executive of Access 360 Media Inc., a youth-market consultant based in New York and Los Angeles, his clients include MTV and AT&T.
Mr. Tsunder says he saves a suit for some occasions, such as meetings with investors who might lose confidence if he appears too edgy. But he's careful to note that his isn't a businessman's status suit: He bought it at Zara, the fast-fashion chain. His outfit costs more when he wears Diesel blue jeans, a white J. Lindeberg belt and Prada shoes.
For a recent meeting with MTV, Mr. Tsunder wore silver Nike Air Force athletic shoes and a white collared shirt under a mint green V-necked sweater "because it's youthful." With a more conservative client, he says, he'll wear something more "aggressive," such as "a collared shirt that I found in the south of France."
Tina Wells, the 28-year-old founder and CEO of Buzz Marketing Group in Voorhees, N.J., wears a similarly broad high-to-low mix of brands to work. This includes mini dresses from Target, Chanel ballerina flats, and a lot of luxury denim. Like many of her generation, she defines her clothing by label: True Religion, Raven and Citizens of Humanity.
She founded her company, which serves clients that include Swarovski Group, at 16. "I'm not a Harvard M.B.A.-type person," Ms. Wells says. "If I were just a girl in a suit, I think it wouldn't clearly demonstrate" the degree of sophistication her company has to offer, she says.
She hasn't thrown out all the traditional rules. Ms. Wells has banned certain lace tops and asked one intern to remove her chin-piercing for work, saying, "I think we shouldn't scare the clients."
Yet Ms. Wells has also rejected the below-the-knee skirts and neat matching sweaters suggested by her mother. "The boomer generation -- they love those twin sets," she says. "I like cardigans, but not the set -- oh gosh, not the set."
Avoiding an overly matchy-matchy look has become a generation-defining choice. It's as though matching jackets and skirts suggest an overreliance on parents' stiff fashion conventions. Cynthia Johnson, Derek Johnson's 52-year-old mother, notes, "I was born in the '50s -- we had rules that you don't wear white after Sept. 30."
When Mr. Johnson got his first professional job -- an internship in midtown New York City -- his parents bought him two $900 suits at Nordstrom. But Mr. Johnson declines to wear those suits, even as he meets with venture capitalists to raise money for Tatango. He says he did wear one once to make a presentation, but he adds ruefully, "I think I wasn't really myself."
