There is a particular photograph from a 1998 Tata Motors annual report where every man in the boardroom is wearing a tie. Not a single open collar. Not a single jacket off the back of a chair. The room reads as a uniform, which it more or less was. Twenty eight years later, the people running comparable rooms are in cotton shirts, sometimes a polo, often a shacket if the AC is honest. Almost no ties. Same boardrooms, very different rules.

How that happened, and what it means for what you wear to work this Wednesday, is more interesting than it looks.

The suit and tie India that quietly disappeared

For most of the 1990s, Indian corporate dress was inherited from a colonial template that nobody had got around to questioning. Banks, audit firms, the older industrial houses, the consulting practices that were just opening Indian offices: all ran on a strict shirt, tie, jacket logic, even in a Mumbai July. The tie was not about climate. It was about category. It told you which side of the lift you were on.

The first crack came not from the boardroom but from the engineering floor. The IT services boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s built companies whose entire workflow happened across time zones, where the visible corporate uniform mattered less than the deliverable. By the mid 2010s, Indian IT majors had begun shifting decisively to business casual, with Infosys among the early movers in dropping the necktie requirement.

What the 2010s did

Three things happened at once during the 2010s and they reshaped what office dress meant in India.

First, tech salaries created a new professional class whose senior people were literally younger than the old hierarchy expected. A 31 year old engineering manager in Bengaluru was not going to wear the same uniform as a 55 year old branch manager in Nariman Point.

Second, global teams normalised the open collar. If you were on a 7am call with San Francisco where everyone was in a hoodie, the tie at your end started to feel like an affectation rather than a respect signal.

Third, and most quietly, the international firms followed. Goldman Sachs went business casual firmwide in March 2019, and when the most uniform conscious bank on earth makes that move, the cover for everyone else gets very thick very quickly.

The tie did not lose because anyone declared war on it. It lost because the meetings it was made for stopped happening.

On the slow death of the necktie

The 2020 pause and what came back different

The 2020 to 2022 period was a strange interlude. People in fund management roles took video calls from balconies in joggers. People who had spent a decade in starched shirts discovered the linen pyjama. The instinct was that this would all snap back the moment offices reopened.

It did not snap back. What returned in 2023 and 2024 was a more honest version of the dress code that had been building since 2015. The shirt stayed. The tie did not return. The jacket became optional. The shacket arrived as a serious category for the first time, because it solved the AC problem without committing you to a full blazer.

The 2024 RTO problem

Then came the swing back to office. Through 2024 and into 2025, the major Indian IT firms moved to bring employees back to the office for most of the working week, even as employee preference data continued to point the other way. Research from NASSCOM and Deloitte found that around 74% of Indian employees prefer hybrid work.

This created a specific wardrobe problem: dressing for an office you visit three days a week. The old model assumed you wore the same uniform Monday to Friday, so cost per wear was easy. The new model has you in real clothes on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and in something completely different on the days you work from home. The wardrobe has to handle both without bloating into two separate cupboards.

What "smart casual" actually means in an Indian office in 2026

Smart casual is the most abused phrase in Indian corporate communication. It tends to mean whatever the senior most person in the meeting decides it means. A working definition that survives most rooms in 2026:

A collared shirt or a knit polo, in a fabric that does not look slept in. A trouser that is not a jean and not a track pant, ideally in cotton, linen blend, or a light wool. A closed shoe that is not a sneaker for client facing days, a clean low profile sneaker for internal days. A layer that you can put on for cold rooms and take off for warm corridors.

The test is not "would the 1998 boardroom approve". The test is "can I walk into a client meeting at 11am, an internal review at 3pm, and a team dinner at 8pm in this, without changing".

A starting wardrobe for the hybrid week

If you were starting from scratch today, the order would be: three good cotton or linen shirts in neutral colours, two pairs of mid rise trousers in different weights, one knit polo, one unstructured shacket, one pair of leather loafers, one pair of clean white sneakers, one belt that does not announce itself.

That is nine items. They will combine into more outfits than you have working days in a month. They will hold up across the three climate Indian work day described in the comfort guide to dressing for the Indian office. They will not look out of place if your Wednesday escalates into a 9pm dinner.

The bigger shift since the suit and tie India of the 1990s is not about clothes. It is about the room they are worn in. The room got smaller, the meetings got shorter, the hierarchy got flatter, and the wardrobe followed. The wardrobe always follows. It is just usually about a decade behind.