anything goes

1. Everything is permitted, as in You're wearing sneakers to the office?—Why not? Anything goes these days. This idiom began life as everything goes, which appeared in George Meredith's novel The Egoist (1879). In America anything was the preferred word, which gained further currency with Cole Porter's use of the term as the title of his 1934 song and musical comedy, Anything Goes!

Example Sentences

More or less anything goes in the battle to be the last one standing.

From BBC

On the West Coast, he found more “openness” and an “anything goes” ethos that saw the struggling artist move further into music as a means to elucidate and explore creativity.

From Los Angeles Times

It’s mostly true now, too, that anything goes.

From Slate

In her 1979 memoir, the novelist Naomi Mitchison writes about dressing up and its decline since the 1930s as collateral damage in the move to “the present idea that anything goes, so we can always and everywhere be in fancy dress.”

From Slate

I think that’s a healthy disposition for a career in show business, and then I’ll be delightfully surprised if anything goes in a different direction.

From Los Angeles Times