Times2 is confused. We’re on the phone to Vogue magazine and Vogue magazine is telling us that the whole country is smartening up: “The ladylike look is back,” Vogue says. “Even jeans are sort of passé now.”

But what about pyjamas? Now Vogue is confused. Times2 explains that last week a headmaster publicly appealed to women who take their children to and from school while still dressed in nightwear to show some respect. “People don’t go to see a solicitor, bank manager or doctor dressed in pyjamas, so why do they think it’s OK to drop their children off at school dressed like that?” Joe McGuinness, the principal of St Matthew’s primary in Belfast, told his local paper.

And bear in mind that this latest sartorial bombshell comes on top of a lot of other things: on top of the revelation by the Lonely Planetguide to Great Britain that we are known the world over for our slovenliness; on top of the fact that even the Savoy has given in to the cult of comfort-dressing, which means that guests are now allowed to pad about in the legendary hotel’s foyer in flip-flops or shorts; on top of the fact that we’re on the brink of another record-breakingly hot summer – a summer that, because of global warming, may decide never to go away – and we all know what happens to the way people in Britain dress when the temperature skyrockets. Isn’t the pyjama plague just another sign that we have become a nation of irredeemable slobs?

Vogue sighs wearily and says: “Wearing pyjamas is making a statement, which is ‘I don’t care’. Or ‘I’ve got more important things to do’. It’s like when you show up on a date with no make-up.” So this country is not going to seed after all?

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“Do you remember that whole Juicy Couture tracksuit thing? It’s over. So is the boho thing, thank God – all those cardigans. Nobody wears jeans unless they’re gardening, under 21 or working in the media.” Nowadays it’s all about cinched waists and heels, Vogue rhapsodises.

If only getting dressed were so simple. But there has emerged something of an unbridgeable gulf between what Voguetells us is happening on the streets of Britain and what seems to be unfolding before our eyes. Our three-piece suits and our ballgowns are gathering dust. Our dinner jackets venture out now only furtively. Whatever Vogue says, there are jeans in Covent Garden and cleavages in church (Cherie Blair memorably showed us hers at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother). Our hair and teeth are better than ever. They proclaim: “I’ve made the effort.” Our clothes, increasingly, say something else entirely: “Chill.”

At the top of the food chain Tony Blair ushers in an era of occasionally tie-free public appearances. David Cameron follows suit as does, more upsettingly for some television viewers, Dale Winton, who turns up on National Lottery live in February in an open-necked shirt.

More recently Andy Duncan, the Controller of Channel 4, wears jeans – and what many commentators felt was an inappropriately rumpled T-shirt – when defending the channel’s record on bullying and racism. Restaurants pick up on the trend and the trend becomes selfperpetuating. The people at Harden’s restaurant guide can name only five establishments outside London where a jacket and tie is mandatory. If you like A Sense of Occasion with your meal, you'll need to travel to Manches-ter, Cumbria, Suffolk or Sussex, but you’ll be laughed at for your stuffiness.

Meanwhile, Willie Walsh, BA’s chief executive, goes one further, not only refusing to wear a tie at an awards ceremony, but also sending an obnoxious letter to the arline’s in-house magazine after an 82-year-old BA pensioner wrote in to complain. Walsh evidently doesn’t want to look like a drone. He’s telling us that he’s not going to conform.

Nevertheless, it could have been worse. He could have turned up to his awards ceremony, as Victoria Beckham did, wearing fingerless biker gloves teamed with a pair of underpants.

Is this appropriate attire for a high-pro-file function, times2 wants to know? Should we be wearing only our pants to the next staff party? Glamour, which is after all a fashion magazine and an arbiter of such things, still named Beckham entrepreneur of the year – for doing exactly what we’ll never know.

We seek the opinion of Sarah Setterfield, the managing director of the image consul-tancy Impact4Success.

“The problem is celebrities wear things to get photographed and get into magazines, but a lot of youngsters are not able to see that this kind of dress is not appropriate for a business environment,” she says.

“The common-sense element has not been instilled and I see young people merrily swanning along into the job market not realising that hoodies or displays of cleavage are not all right at work.”

What about pyjamas? “Pyjamas do not send out the right message in a business environment,” What about wrinkly T-shirts? “A lot of young men wear their shirts out at the back because it’s fashionable. Or long hair. It’s tricky, because a lot of companies either don’t have dress codes or their dress codes are vague. You don’t want to be sued for constructive dismissal because you told a man to cut off his ponytail. These days,” she adds, perhaps a touch ruefully, “you have to ask him to tie it back.”

Her bête noir is women who come into work wearing shorts with opaque tights and heels. How short are the shorts? “Just underneath the cheek of the bottom,” says Setterfield, and leaves the word “bottom” hanging in the air for a few moments for chilly emphasis.

“It’s quite shocking. Dressing like that shows a lack of self-respect.” Still, she adds: “You have to remember what people were going around in in the Seventies.”

And Setterfield is perky about the sudden rise in interest rates: “When the economy is booming everything becomes more casual and comfortable because people become more relaxed.

“But now we’re seeing redundancies and a tightening of the economy. Businesses need to realise that their most precious sales tool is their people.”

Times2 doesn’t think much about this human sales tool concept. And it’s doubtful that, on his way up, a man like Andy Duncan did either.

But could Duncan have got away with it had he worked in a bank?

We decide to go to Barclays, where in 2005 managers banned staff from wearing three-quarter-length trousers, strapless tops, trainers, sportswear and denim. On our way there we see all of the aforementioned, as well as: a man in a green T-shirt that reads “Well Hung” under a picture of a coathanger (to go with his T-shirt the expression on his face reads, “What?”); a lot of bared feet – raw and pink, they squirm about in their new sandals like the prematurely born spawn of some as-yet-to-be-identified subterranean creature; a sprinkling of romper suits (this year’s tracksuit, according to one of Vogue’s rivals); and more T-shirts with slogans.

(An aside here about such T-shirts: although they were supposed to have died a death some time ago, people still wear them, predominantly because, like greetings cards, the blank ones are more expensive.

Offensive seems to be the way thqat slogan T-shirts are going. I ask the Italian owner of a barber’s whether men in his country wear clothes that boast about the size of their penis. “No,” he says. “This is disgusting.”

I ask his Slovenian assistant whether women in his home town would think it appropriate to wear a tank-top on which are stencilled the words “BJ Queen”. “We don’t have a word for this thing. We borrow from Serbian,” he says.)

But behind the bullet-proof glass in Barclays, the dress-up campaign of two years ago seems to have taken hold. Not a single slogan T-shirt, bare midriff or bum cleavage in sight among the bank’s nigh-immaculate staff. And Joe McGuiness was right to assert that people don’t go to see their bank managers in pyjamas. Most customers here today are dressed in inoffensive daywear and they even remove the earphones of their iPods when it’s their turn to mime their banking request to the cashier because the interconnecting microphone system is faulty.

OK, so Barclays is a bank, but some say the financial industry narrowly averted a pyjama crisis when first Lehman Brothers then most other banks started ditching their dress-down policies from 2002, the year of the dot-com crash.

Up to that point the public face of banking had tried hard to ape the laid-back dress sense of the Gappishly inclined technology sector.

By 2001, things had got out of hand. Deut-sche Bank went so far as to have a go at staff for wearing “clubbing attire” to work and encouraged them to “rebuild their business wardrobe” with tips on sales shopping.

Then came a survey by American Corporate Trends magazine, which discovered a 63 per cent rise in customer complaints on days when staff wore casual clothes.

Times2 is thinking: what lessons can we learn here? That it’s easier to throw on a pair of jeans than a ballgown, easier still not to get out of your pyjamas at all. It may be easier, but in our attempts to express our individuality through clothes, we’ve dumbed ourselves down.

So the next time you find yourself near a wardrobe, instead of reaching for flip-flops, dig out the heels, the tie, the immaculate suit. Shorts may have been a sign of individuality in 1995, now they’re the uniform of the sartorially cautious and underconfident masses.

What to wear, where to wear it

Theatre: The days of tails and top hats and corsets and gloves are looked on with nostalgia. To trudge your way out of this sartorial limbo follow this basic rule of thumb: smart casual for matinees and party casual for evening performances.

Doctor’s office: When dressing for an examination, don an outfit similar to what you would wear on the third date – something tailored but casual that you can take off and put on with ease.

School run: This is a time when it’s as much about what not to wear as what to wear. Only the most competitive among you should attempt achieving the look of prim perfection à la Anna Wintour: crease-free Prada, not a hair out of place, cheeks still rosy from the 4am tennis workout. But the other extreme of hopping directly from the bed to the car without so much as a glance at a mirrored surface, is a dare only for those whose wardrobe “investment pieces” extend well into nightwear. Dads and nannies, this means you too. Try a third-way dressing: a cross between casual and smart casual should be fine. NB: ladies, step away from the elasticised trousers.

Where to shop:

Relaxed casual: H&M, Primark, American Apparel.

Casual: Gap, Topshop, Next.

Smart casual: Reiss, Marks & Spencer, Cos, Jaeger, Paul Smith and Austin Reed.

Party casual: Zara, Coast, Karen Millen.

The making of Brand Me

Twenty years ago male dress was like male Christian names. You didn’t want anything that made you stand out. I started office life at that time and my first boss’s advice was blunt. Always wear a jacket and tie and don’t make them too colourful. You are not the story. Blend in.

These days “you” are the story and blending in is akin to copping out. I’ve gone suited and booted to meetings with senior executives from Tesco and Unilever only to find they express their seniority by dressing in Quicksilver rather than Gieves & Hawkes. Ties and suits survive only in those last refuges of male conformism and power: the City and Parliament.

Tony Blair might claim some credit for the acceleration in male casualness and individuality, but something far more important happened in 1997. Fast Company magazine published an article by the management guru Tom Peters entitled “The Brand Called You”. Peters’s thesis was that white-collar workers could no longer rely on their companies to look after them from internship to carriage clock. So you had to market yourself like a product, seizing opportunities to make your own way. Dress was vital. “You figure out what it takes to create a distinctive role for yourself, you create a message and a strategy to promote the brand called You.”

So we entered the era of smart casual. It’s a weak fudge of a word, and it has allowed men, Englishmen especially, to write a whole new chapter in the book of sartorial infamy. But for most of us it’s been a liberation. Today I’m in white jeans, grey T-shirt, grey-wool DKNY jacket and navy-blue Oliver Sweeney loafers. It’s not to everyone’s tastes and my former boss would think that I’ve gone to the other side sexually. But it’s comfortable, right for the weather – and like it or lump it, it’s Brand Me. Mark Jones

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