What’s the plan for this late-summer Sunday? Might you be blocking out a few hours for a wardrobe edit and reset? Have you found that you’re out on the road more than ever before and missing the essential garments that can take you from Jakarta to Sapporo and over to Vancouver all in your carry-on? Is it time to hit the shops and figure out what your new uniform should be for meeting clients, day trips on the Eurostar and board meetings with your family office? If you’re a bit stumped and don’t know where to start, try this on.

It was an early morning Iberia flight from Barajas to Heathrow a few months ago that taught me the best no-fail, always sharp get-up is “modern Madrid banker”. If you’re unfamiliar with this very specific look it mixes a light-grey flannel trouser that’s ever so slightly on the short side, dark-brown loafers, crisp monogrammed white shirt, navy knitted tie and a navy blazer that’s neither too boxy nor too nipped-in. To top it off you’ll also need that timeless, swept-back Iberian haircut, slightly longish and with just enough volume so that even the tiniest banker from Zaragoza somehow appears five centimetres taller. And for the ladies? You too can stay in Spain as Massimo Dutti Studio has definitely amped-up its offering. And if you want to funk things up a notch, Galicia-based Cordera is also on point.

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed the topic of uniforms, guidelines and staying within them has become a leading topic when I meet clients. At dinner in Zürich a CEO asked me if I could find out how his competitor is able to keep its staff looking elegant and well-groomed while he was fighting a running battle about whether female employees should shave their legs and male staff be allowed to wear jangly earrings. A big bank recently permitted its client advisors to ditch their ties and also to wear white sneakers. Now it’s asking whether this was the right move as that’s not what its clients have come to expect, yet “members of the younger generation need freedom to express themselves in the workplace.” And earlier this week in Toronto a global hospitality group said that it was struggling to define itself as premium as too many staff were telling management that they didn’t need guidance about what to wear and supervisors were too scared to enforce basics around simple hygiene. At every meeting the same questions have hung over the boardroom table: how did we let things get so baggy? How do we tighten up our presentation? And when did we lose our courage to fight for our brand?

It’s at this point that I usually interject and remind the exasperated management that they need to pause, spin the globe and take a good look around. I explain that in many parts of the world the uniform is alive and well – and not just in the offices of Air Koryo in Pyongyang or tractor factories in Belarus. “But how do we get back to where we were 10 years ago?” they ask. “Before the pandemic? To the glory days of simply altering a uniform without needing everything to be elasticated and all footwear vegan?”

In the case of the Canadian hospitality company, I explained that it was going to be a bumpy, winding, black-ice-covered road back to something that resembled its golden years and would require the board finding the courage to jettison some of its rigid inclusivity initiatives in favour of enhanced customer satisfaction and brand preservation. Such advice used to be met with looks of surprise and spasms of wincing but so acute is the problem with brand erosion that it’s clear we’re at a point where something has to give. As we speed along to the start of Q4 and corporate strategies are tweaked, overhauled or ripped up, I get a sense that many companies in the West will be weighing up how they get back to bolstering their customer base and building brand loyalty through superior products and service delivery rather than political gestures and narrow initiatives that cater to the few rather than the majority. The Toronto exec summed it up best: “We’ve come to a point where we’ve lost our best people because they were embarrassed by the lack of structure and colleagues showing up for their shift in slippers. It all happened on our watch.”