Wall Street dressed down after winning, tech dresses up while uncertain

Tech workers are buttoning up while finance workers roll up their sleeves — a reversal that looks like simple cultural drift but is not.

Wall Street dressed down because it had already won. By the early 1990s, after deregulation and securitization had consolidated finance's grip on governance and wealth creation, informality became affordable — a luxury of the already-arrived.

The casual tie was a trophy, not a plea. You can afford to look uncertain about your own importance only when your importance is no longer uncertain.

Tech is performing this grammar backward. Silicon Valley is formalizing at precisely the moment when its institutional legitimacy remains contested. It has not yet moved through regulatory acceptance into post-legitimacy casualness. The blazers are not trophies. They are petitions. This is what anxiety about belonging looks like when it has money enough to buy the right uniform but not yet the structural security that makes uniforms irrelevant.

The tech executive in a tailored jacket is trying to pass a test he does not yet understand. The test of already having passed. This is what happens when an industry mistakes the costume for what the costume once announced. When you are new to a world, you wear the world's clothes. When you have remade the world, you wear your own. Tech is still learning the difference between being invited to the table and building one.