My morning routine has morphed into something my younger self wouldn’t recognize. After waking, I shuffle to the bathroom, brush my teeth, and then engage in the most important decision of my day: Which parts of me will be seen by the outside world?
I call it the Zoom Mullet—business on top, party (or more accurately, sad comfort) on the bottom. It’s the modern professional’s uniform, and I’ve perfected the art of looking boardroom-ready from the waist up while maintaining the comfort of a man who has given up from the waist down.
I wasn’t always like this. Back in my corporate tech days, I was the guy who showed up in pressed shirts and tailored pants. My shoes were always polished. I owned three different briefcases for different types of meetings. Looking the part was part of the game.
Then came March 2020, and suddenly we all became rectangular heads in digital boxes. The great equalizer. The pants apocalypse.
My first video call from home was a disaster. I hadn’t yet learned the rules of this new world. I stood up mid-meeting to grab a document, unwittingly revealing my SpongeBob SquarePants pajama bottoms to the entire product development team. The CMO was on that call. So was an external consultant we were paying $300 an hour. A moment of silence for my dignity.
After that incident, I quickly adapted. I developed a system: nice shirt, decent grooming, acceptable backdrop—and whatever the hell I wanted below camera level. The bottom half of my body entered a permanent casual Friday.
My wife caught on quickly. “Are you wearing your interview blazer with Homer Simpson pajamas?” she asked one morning, equal parts amused and horrified. I was. And I had a presentation to the board in ten minutes. I told her it was about finding small freedoms in a constrained world. She told me it was about being too lazy to put on real pants. We were both right.
The oddest part about the Zoom Mullet lifestyle isn’t the outfit clash—it’s how quickly it became normal. I now have shirts I think of as “video call shirts” hanging separately in my closet. They’re judged solely on how they look from chest to shoulders within the limited frame of a webcam. The bottom drawer of my dresser contains what I now simply call “lower half clothings”—an assortment of sweatpants, gym shorts, and pajama bottoms in various states of elasticity.
My crowning achievement came during quarter-end reviews last year. I delivered a 30-minute presentation on digital engagement metrics while wearing a crisp blue button-down, a subtly patterned tie—and below the desk, the plaid flannel pajama bottoms my daughter had given me for Christmas, paired with fuzzy slippers shaped like grizzly bear paws. I received compliments on my professionalism. If they only knew I was part grizzly bear.
The psychological effects of this bifurcated existence are more complex than you might think. There’s something strangely liberating about the knowledge that half of you is professional while the other half remains defiantly, comfortably disengaged. It’s a physical manifestation of how many of us feel about work itself—partially committed, partially wishing we were still in bed.
This isn’t just about comfort, though. The Zoom Mullet is an unspoken acknowledgment of the artifice of professional life. We’ve always played roles at work, but video calls have made the performance more literal. We’re now actors on a digital stage, visible only in part, creating the illusion of complete professional composure.
I’ve started noticing the tells in others. The slight adjustment of posture when someone stands slightly to reach something off-camera. The suspicious shuffling sounds before someone quickly turns their microphone off. The relief in a colleague’s eyes when they mention they’re wearing “home office attire” and you respond with the knowing nod of a fellow pajama-bottomed professional.
My favorite Zoom moment happened during a tense negotiation with a potential client. I was making my case for why our services were worth the premium price when my cat decided to investigate the strange warmth of my laptop. As I tried to maintain my authoritative pitch about ROI projections, Pixel climbed onto my lap, directly between me and the camera, presenting his rear end to the entire meeting. I apologized profusely, but the client—a buttoned-up financial services executive—burst out laughing. “My dog did the same thing yesterday,” she admitted. “I was wearing gym shorts under this blazer and he brought me his leash.” We closed the deal that day.
The facade occasionally cracks in other ways. Last summer, during a heat wave, I took a call from my backyard patio. Professional shirt, tie, AirPods—and below the frame, swimming trunks. Halfway through the meeting, a neighborhood kid’s errant water balloon scored a direct hit on my laptop. As I jumped up in surprise, my entire team got a full view of my beach-ready lower half. Nobody said anything directly, but the next day our team Slack had a new custom emoji of a person in a suit jacket and swim trunks.
There’s a strange honesty in the dishonesty of the Zoom Mullet. We’re simultaneously admitting and concealing the truth: that work has invaded our personal spaces, and in return, we’ve allowed our personal comfort to infiltrate work. It’s a silent rebellion, a small reclaiming of physical comfort in exchange for giving up the boundary between office and home.
My teenage self would be baffled by this arrangement. In the 90s, the idea that professional success would someday involve wearing half an outfit while staring at a screen filled with other people wearing half-outfits would have sounded like a bizarre dystopia. Add in the fact that we now regularly forget to unmute ourselves before speaking, accidentally share our screens showing private tabs, and have to remind each other “you’re frozen” or “we can’t hear you,” and it becomes clear that we’re living in a very specific kind of absurdist play.
Not everyone embraces the Zoom Mullet, of course. I have one colleague who insists on wearing full business attire for every call, even though we all know he lives alone and goes directly from his bedroom to his home office. “It’s about the mindset,” he insists. I respect his commitment while also suspecting he’s lying. Nobody wears dress shoes at their home desk. Nobody.
The pandemic may have faded, but the Zoom Mullet lives on. Even as some offices reopen, video calls remain a staple of professional life. I find myself in the strange position of actually planning outfits around which meetings will be in-person versus on-screen. “Tuesday I need full professional attire; Wednesday I can get away with the oxford shirt and sweatpants combo” is a thought I regularly have while doing laundry.
I wonder what this split existence does to our sense of authenticity. Are we being more true to ourselves by prioritizing comfort, or less genuine by maintaining the illusion of full professionalism? My conclusion after three years of Zoom Mullet life is: both, simultaneously.
When I recently returned to our actual office for a quarterly all-hands meeting, I felt strange putting on proper pants. They seemed overly formal, unnecessarily restrictive. I found myself missing the freedom of my home office attire. But there was also something refreshing about being fully dressed, fully present in a physical space with colleagues. No mute button, no option to turn off my camera, no cats presenting their backsides to the CEO.
As I sat in that meeting, I realized something odd had happened: the Zoom Mullet had begun to affect how I experience in-person work too. Part of me was fully engaged, taking notes and asking questions. Another part was mentally still at home, wondering if anyone would notice if I slipped off my shoes under the conference table.
The Zoom Mullet isn’t just an outfit choice—it’s a state of mind, a perfect metaphor for our current relationship with work. We’re simultaneously engaged and detached, professional and casual, present and distant. We’re giving exactly 50% of ourselves to the professional world, at least in terms of proper attire.
So tomorrow morning, I’ll once again stand before my closet, selecting a suitable shirt for being seen while ignoring everything below the belt. I’ll project competence and authority from the chest up, while my legs enjoy the freedom of clothes chosen purely for comfort. It’s not quite authentic, but it’s not entirely fake either. Like so much of modern life, it exists in the messy, contradictory middle.
Business up top, pajamas down below. The Zoom Mullet abides.
