Adfero’s Dress Down Friday – pullovers for politics?

Firstly let me apologise to anyone who is reading this blog, as this post is totally off topic. I am not even going to mention online media consumption in this post - it truly is about dress down Fridays.

As you can probably guess, last Friday Adfero had a dress down day across the Manchester and London offices. The outcome was brilliant and over £300 was donated in total across two charities. Worth saying a thank you here to any Adfero employees taking part and especially those who made a donation (those of you who dodged the collection box should be ashamed). So clearly this is an excellent way of raising money for charity and in fact helped me raise money a few months ago for a charity London marathon run.

Personally i dread the idea of DDF not partially because of memories of school where “own choice day” was just an excuse for the older children to take the Michael out of you for wearing Nick trainers from the market rather than Nikes. That said on Friday i was shocked at how good DDF is for getting to know your colleagues. I saw people talking to each other about bands on each other's T shirts, people asking where they could get a particular “top”, people shocked that they were wearing the same clothes and people trying on each other’s hats. From a personal experience I found colleagues asking me how me how old I was when my clothes had given away the secret that despite being bald I’m not just a few years away from drawing my pension.

So an excellent success all round and a good fun day at Adfero but this did start me thinking that if wearing your own clothes can break down barriers and shyness with colleagues, will wearing your own clothes ever be political vote winner? Clearly people want to empathise with celebrities and politicians and seeing them out of their made up appearance makes them seem more normal. Taking this one step further, will this ever catch on with politics? Would you relate more to your local politician if they were wearing jeans and a jumper except on special occasions? Would seeing Gordon Brown in an AC/DC T-shirt make you realise he is still a person not a senseless face?

I think it would take brave politician to be the first to find out but i would admire them for it.