Here’s a change of pace from recent depressing news, unless, of course, you’re a stickler for fashion (from Louisville Business First):

Fewer companies are advertising casual dress codes in 2025 than in years past, but that doesn’t mean relaxed in-office attire is going away.

An analysis of job postings by job-matching platform Adzuna and shared exclusively with The Playbook found that the percentage of listings in April that mentioned a casual dress code came in at 61.1%, the lowest April figure since the onset of the pandemic. In April 2019, casual dress code mentions were part of 58.5% of job listings. That number rose to 63% in April 2020 and reached a peak of 80.6% in April 2022 before coming back down.

Meanwhile, references to business-casual dress codes, which stood at 40.2% of job postings in April 2019, fell all the way to 18.6% of job postings in April 2022 before rising back up to 37.2% this year, according to Adzuna.

The shift in numbers doesn’t, however, mean casual dress codes are going away. Experts point to return-to-office initiatives and the fading use of dress codes as a way to recruit new workers as a combination that’s shaping current dynamics.

The reality is casual dress is so commonplace, it shouldn’t be something that has to be advertised.

When I started working in the 1970s, I continued my clothing habits from boarding school: a jacket and tie every day. That’s how I appeared in my first jobs in Florida and Kentucky. When I was in politics and when I was working for the Wall Street Journal, I wore a suit every day. Then, at the Washington Post, I went back to a jacket and tie, until I saw that the top editor rarely wore a tie, so it was pretty much business casual every day, and jeans when I worked weekends.

And in my last job, in San Francisco, where everybody dresses down, if there weren’t any important meetings, I’d wear sweatpants or jeans and flannel shirts. So, over more than 40 years my wardrobe shrank, and with retirement, I’m more likely to dress like I’m in SF than it I were at the WSJ.

But I have to admit, I like the concept of the anti-suit pictured above.