One of the perks of being your own boss, is every day is casual Friday, if you wish it. And that spirit of wearing what you want has come to pervade the highly entrepreneurial head space that typifies Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood.
Once a gritty extension of downtown Seattle, the southern shore of the city’s Lake Union has been remade in recent years by Amazon.com, the e-tailing megalopolis, which is moving its nearby Belltown digs into new high-rise towers that it has designed from the ground up. In this land of laissez faire capitalism and coding, all efforts at a dress code have been abandoned.
Shorts, be they cargo or Bermuda, rule the day during weather events like the recent heat spell, and nary a tie can be found on anyone (other than the occasional out-of-town accountant or attorney passing through).
And why not? This is home to a breed of free-thinkers, who trade open-source instructions for their electronic brains to perform miracles of computation. They design the future every day, so why not allow each other the freedom to design their own unique looks?
No conformists living lives of quiet desperation here, right? But what if they’re all just conforming to nonconformity?
Manny Frishberg is our ground reporter in Seattle.
From Seattle, Wash.:
Every Day is Casual Friday
By Manny Frishberg