Happy Birthday to the Suit

http://www.economist.com/node/17722802?story_id=17722802

by Andrew_Quentin • 16 years ago

56 34 16 years ago

economist.com

edge17• 16 years ago

that was enlightening

Mz• 16 years ago

I love fashion history. There is so much social history tied up in it.

Excerpts:

Savile Row was inhabited largely by surgeons before the tailors moved in during the 19th century, and their influence can be seen in the “surgeon’s cuff”. On the most expensive suits the cuff buttons, which mirror the pips of military rank, can be undone, allowing the sleeve to be rolled back. This let surgeons attend patients spouting blood without removing their coats—an important distinction that set them apart from shirt-sleeved tradesmen of the lower orders. Surgeon’s shirts, with detachable cuffs, are still made to order by London tailors.

And:

Colours and cuts come—the fashion a decade ago was for four-button jackets—and go. Yet the modern world has transformed the suit’s interior. Pockets for train and bus tickets appeared with the commuter. Pen pockets and pockets for mobile phones have followed. Mr Munday has fielded inquiries about internal pockets to hold an iPad. No problem, he says. They are not so very different to the large “hare” pockets on the inside of field coats worn by country gents that will hold birds and rabbits felled with a shotgun.

mbesto• 16 years ago

Form follows function.

Umalu• 16 years ago

Interesting history of the suit. But while the article sees a future for the suit, to me the suit is history. Suits once denoted upper class, and sumptuary laws prevented lower classes from looking upper. Now suits denote lower middle management in an old economy company. No one aspires to that. Jeans, sweats and t-shirts are the new class separator, indicating which of us have earned the freedom from having to wear suits.

alex_c• 16 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree, but that seems like a pretty Valley-centric view to me - or at least, limited to industries where appearances are less important than results.

p_nathan• 16 years ago

I don't know of any larger-business CEOs besides Jobs who dresses casually. Certainly the execs(mid-size company) in my company always have a suit on in public/semi-public appearances.

Could you cite your assertions please?

fecklessyouth4• 16 years ago

I hope the last two clothing items were jokes. Though what you wear is somewhat a matter of taste, suits far outpace sweats and t-shirts in portraying a man's body. A nipped waist, slightly padded shoulders, and straight legs will always make a better impression.

lsc2• 16 years ago

sure, it makes you look more physically attractive; nobody is arguing with that. But, looking nice is not always an advantage.

Given no other information, are you going to hire the programmer who obviously puts a lot of effort into his appearance? or the programmer who does not?

I mean, I know people who answer both ways. Some people think looking nice is a sign of respect... but others assume that if you put that much effort into your appearance you must be covering up for incompetence.

mkn• 16 years ago

Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, has an insight that I think you've missed: Suits make lower-class labor work impossible for the wearer, and are therefore intrinsically a signal of higher class.

That sumptuary laws are gone is not a weakening of the class distinction implied by suits, but a demonstration of their effectiveness.

>>No one aspires to that. Jeans, sweats and t-shirts are the new class separator, indicating which of us have earned the freedom from having to wear suits.

The key thing here is that there is a difference between aspiration and ability. Clothes unsuitable for labor merely indicate a commitment to an information occupation. Suits, expensive clothes that look good and are unsuitable for labor, also indicate a social commitment to the organization, a social commitment necessary to advance within the ranks.

In many, if not most, software firms, the way to success is upward through management. For a while, it was through stock options or stock grants. In the latter two scenarios, no social commitment was necessary, so come-as-you-are became the norm.

Come-as-you-are seems to survive for two other reasons. Firstly, the class distinction between partners & the board vs the line-level programmers has to do with ownership, and no amount of coding, whether performed in jeans or in a suit, can help you over that barrier within the organization. Secondly and consequently, the route across that social divide, for the line-level programmer, is via a start-up effort undertaken as a side project, outside the social structure of the worker's organization.

These trends are not heading in a direction that portends an infinite ocean of denim and sweats, but rather for a re-emergence of business casual or even smart casual in the workplace for programmers, and again for suits in the managing establishment. Suits are a signifier that someone is adept at controlling other humans and getting them to perform work for them. The ability to get computers to do useful (capital-capturing) work has upended this temporarily. As this algorithmic market commoditizes, or at least as the exploitable niches fill, the ability to control people instead of machines will become more important again. Even without commoditization and niche-capture, the fitness advantage of being able to control and manage an organization still portends a crystallization of an owning class, complete with ownership regalia, the suit.

The short of it is this: If you program for another organization and don't have an amazing side-project, you might consider the slacks-and-jacket smart casual look if you want to move ahead.

donaldc• 16 years ago

Says you. You must be exposed to very different workplaces than me. I've yet to work at a place in the last ten years where any of suits, business casual, or smart casual is practiced, or encouraged. Pretty much, normal street clothes are perfectly fine.

hrktb• 16 years ago

>Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, has an insight that I think you've missed: Suits make lower-class labor work impossible for the wearer, and are therefore intrinsically a signal of higher class.

I think your image of lower-class labor is outdated. There are now 'literate' jobs that pay way less while being tougher than a lot of 'physical' jobs. Like working on a call center on a daily pay.

There's a whole class of people in Japan who are homeless but work in a suit.

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

A suit is a signifier that your position is so tenuous that you must kowtow to people who can be manipulated by cheap tricks. If my CEO started wearing one, I'd figure we were reduced to chasing dumb money and probably doomed.

adestefan• 16 years ago

Your $100 jeans and t-shirt with some witty Internet meme differentiate you from the gardener in real work clothes.

icegreentea• 16 years ago

Everything goes in cycles. Especially fashion. I can tell you right now that amongst my university friends, there's definitely a feeling of 'man, suit's are awesome'. No doubt fueled by Mad Men.

I mean, we'll both want jobs where we can show up in shorts and flip flops whenever we want, but we also kinda want jobs where we get to wear suits (as long as we get enough pay so the suits don't bankrupt us). Cause suits make you look -awesome-. And doing anything in a suit just makes you feel kinda giddy and special.

fecklessyouth4• 16 years ago

Absolutely. The same phase occurred in the 70s, until the power suit was brought back.

andreyf• 16 years ago

Relevant? http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

mdda• 16 years ago

Naturally, this could be a clever PR campaign - and I would be more suspicious, apart from it appearing in this edition of the Economist :

The Christmas Economist is a special two-week version : the content of a regular issue makes up about 50%, the other 50% consists of special multi-page articles written by staff writers when the urge took hold (but were too long to put into a regular edition). This is somewhat akin to Google's 20% time : The writers are given an opportunity to publish pieces that they've written for the love of writing.

Of course, this could be my own rose-coloured glasses (I've been a religious Economist reader for 15 years).

jamesbritt• 16 years ago

"The writers are given an opportunity to publish pieces that they've written for the love of writing."

Wow.

For Christmas I bought the wife a subscription to The Economist.

I wanted something to wrap, so I picked up the current issue at Barnes&Noble (surprisingly, neither Walgreen nor Safeway had it). It happened to be the year-end double-issue.

I saw the suit article; now I'm curious about the other articles, since I bet their authors have made them interesting by virtue of their own enthusiasm.

johnohara• 16 years ago

As a younger man, I worked in the concrete construction business for exactly 10 hours.

In the morning, we unloaded and placed an entire truckload of foundation forms by hand. In the afternoon, we dug out the ground for a new garage pour, by hand. Then, a full truckload of gravel showed up, and we spread it, by hand.

I fell asleep in the truck on the way back to the yard.

The next day, the owner approached me, gave me $100 dollars cash, and thanked me for my service. That was it. Career over.

I spent the $100 on a new suit. I didn't know what I was going to do for a job, but I knew I wanted that suit as my work clothes.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

To clarify, you quit, or he fired you because you fell asleep?

j2d2j2d22• 16 years ago

I used to work for Bear Stearns. I was thinking of quitting before the crisis hit but had to stay and watch after the day our stock value dropped to $2 a share.

By the time I left I really hated working there. I tell some of the story here: http://j2labs.net/blog/2010/jan/11/economies-pools-and-piss/

Anyway, when I moved out of the apartment I had, near Wall St, I threw out my suits. I told myself I'd never take a job that required a suit. The suit felt like a hollow nod between business men that the appearance of success was to be regarded just as highly as the ability to succeed.

I'm less hostile to suits today, but I much prefer to do business with the types of people that also don't like wearing them.

niccl• 16 years ago

Most of the time I work as a contract software and hardware engineer. I usually wear Jeans and a T-shirt for that.

Sometimes I take a short contract doing my old job of management consultant. Then I tell the client I'll wear a suit if they want me to, but I charge $30 per hour more if I do (around a 20% premium). I make it clear that they get the same advice and analysis no matter what I wear. Every client has paid the extra. I'm sure it says something about something, but I'm not really sure what.

cynicalkane• 16 years ago

I really have to disagree with this attitude.

Suits are the great equalizer of clothing. They're designed to downplay the wearer's bodily proportions, and it's very hard to look bad in one. Most people can't tell the difference between a cheap suit, well-tailored, and an expensive one. The suit-and-tie pattern visually draws the eyes toward the wearer's face. Aside from these things, they have very little detail, and that's why they were the post-Depression standard businesswear in America, replacing things like morning coats and top hats and stripey pants.

Computer guys usually don't wear suits because they don't want to spend the extra time and money on them. That's fine. But it should be understood that the typical business casual getup is often visually more distracting than a suit, and does not emphasize the face over the body like a suit does.

You'd be better off just charging everyone $30 extra, and always wearing the suit.

JimmyL• 16 years ago

If you can add a 20% markup while providing the same service and with no impact on sales, that screams that you're undercharging everyone. Up your base price for everyone by $40 an hour (if they'll pay $30 more, they'll pay $40 more), and then adjust your suit-wearing premium accordingly.

bediger• 16 years ago

Another PR Hit for Men's Wearhouse, eh?

tomjen3• 16 years ago

If it was, I do not mind. It was an interesting article of the kind that we want on hn. It should not matter who wrote it.

CallMeV• 16 years ago

I watched a TV documentary a few months back, which took a look inside the various tailors' establishments of Savile Row. Consider this: back then, these shops were the startups and entrepreneurs of their day, coming to the street with a few bolts of cloth and next to no money in their hands, spotting the needs of the customers and moving in to sell them a product specifically suited to their needs.

The age of many of these stores speaks volumes of their capacity to read the market over the decades. Anyone who's ever set up a business and wanted it to last could do well to look at these businesses' example.

johnyzee• 16 years ago

The Suit is Back!

Happy Birthday to the Suit

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