Corporate America has traditionally defined dress codes for its workers. Business formal, business casual, Friday casual and black tie have long been synonymous with the corporate workplace. While their interpretation has changed over the past decades, certain industries have continued to retain their conservative dress sense. Retailers like Brooks Brothers, Phillip Van Huesen and Jones New York play up the essence of business attire, making it a common stop for most recent graduates prior to starting their new jobs.

While most adapt easily to business formal, not too many end up redefining it, especially when the marketplace offers many choices without straying outside the concept of business formal. Now, switch the screen to across the world to the land of outsourcing, cheap labor, call centers, a techno-savvy population and 24-hour help lines for American products. Welcome to corporate India.

For most of the 20^th century, it has been mandatory for anyone in India wanting a professional job to have, at the minimum, a bachelor’s degree. Those who couldn’t ended up in retail, construction or mom-and-pop stores. In such a landscape, then how is formal attire defined? The country built on the Gandhian teachings to live simply and naturally while adapting to modernization and progressive technology, remains deeply rooted in its traditional ways.

In such metros like New Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, where most corporations are headquartered, hot and humid weather is a reality for the better part of the year. With air-conditioning being restricted to a minority of offices and complexes, collectively coming to terms with what constitutes “business formal” in such harsh conditions has been a bit of a challenge. Central air-conditioning, while prevalent in most office buildings, has not yet been able to breach all workplaces and public buildings, due to issues of cost, supply and reliability. As a result of this wide variability in working conditions, business formal has become an issue of ‘to each his own’.

Enter a deluge of two-piece cotton wear in its many colors.

Women preferred Fab India, India’s very popular destination, for its cotton-made skirts, shirts and linen pants, while men stuck to formal pleated pants, button-down shirts in various prints and solids--short sleeve for summer and long sleeve for winter. For a new graduate in such a market, it then becomes the natural course of action to head to a Fab India or a Phillip Van Huesen. Incidentally, when PVH first entered the Indian market, they did carry both women’s and men’s lines. However, the formal pants and straight, short skirts didn’t generate enough demand from its female customers, and thus the retailer made a conscious effort to focus on menswear.

While many companies have modified their product lines when venturing into a new market--like McDonald’s McAloo Tikki burger (India’s vegetable sandwich consisting of a potato patty)--PVH has actually benefited from the growth spurt India has undergone. Executives realized they needed to adopt the professional attire of the western world in order to be taken seriously and achieve competitiveness. Accordingly, they had to sacrifice comfort for the formal attire of the global business community.

Of course, it has been easier for the men to adapt than the women. For Indian women, who for the longest time, had been restricted to domesticity, venturing into the workforce meant taking on soft service sector jobs, i.e., teachers, bank tellers and retail store clerks. This meant not having to adhere to such a restrictive dress code. Saris were common.

With educational standards rising and the Indian economy finding a prominent place in the international market, women began to enter sectors long-dominated by their male counterparts; and so began yet another interpretation of business formal.

Today, with women working across all industries and sectors, business formal has become more or less defined to mean professional. As wide as the interpretation might seem, it has for the most part meant pants, collar shirts, the Indian two-piece salwar kameez, and flowing A-line skirts that stop short just above the ankles. While redefining themselves, their capabilities and their feminity, women have continued to restrain their fashion sense to conform to age old conservatism.

Even today, when these female executives travel internationally to secure multi-billion dollar deals and sit on global committees, they carry their identity as Indian women foremost. When given the choice, most prefer the pants/shirt look to the formal skirt/blouse ensemble. Conservative freedom could be the best way to describe it for these female executives. In a country where there remains even to this day, a lack of ethics standards, human resources policies and quality control, their choice of dress has found a sort of comfortable niche, neither being regulated nor challenged.

To tie everything together in an example, a recent experience brought home to me this anticlimactic radicalism female executives are undergoing. Having defined business formal for themselves in the absence of established codes, Indian women today are balancing the thin line of what is acceptable and what is not, using the western world as a reference. After having worn Fab India clothes for years myself, the change in wardrobe was a lesson in culture shock once arriving in America. But that having been many years ago, I felt safe assuming things were much different now in India. Apparently not. While at the mall, a friend on vacation to America curiously bought dozens of shirts but would not pick up a single pair of pants or formal skirts. When asked, she said, not only would she not be able to breathe in them in the hot weather (compounded by the numerous electrical outages that frequent most parts of the country), but she didn’t want to stand out by wearing checked pants or by showing too much leg.

Solid color pants were the way to go, she informed, paired with various cotton shirts. What she meant to say was: Stick with tradition.

Aman Singh is an editor in New York City. She aspires to be a children’s books editor and writes about India and her Indian-ness with candor. Her free moments are spent wondering when the seven continents became one huge global mass of humans. She can be reached at as1808@nyu.edu