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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Hrrrmmm.... tell me about the suit.

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No star here laces

01:01 / 14.07.04

In case you're still interested, I can give you some of my views on current corporate suit ettiquette, how it varies between the UK and Asia, and corporate fashion trends.

So the first thing is that the suit is no longer necessarily an indicator of status. In many companies today, the most senior executives will be casually dressed and more menial employees like salesmen will be the ones wearing suits.

Indeed there was a joke a while back about american entrepreneurs that whenever you met them there would be one guy in a t-shirt and one guy in a suit jacket. The t-shirt guy would be the boss, the jacket guy would be his assistant and he had to wear the jacket in ordr to carry the boss' mobile and pda for him...

In general the more 'traditional' the industry, the more likely there is to be a 'suit hierarchy'. So bankers and lawyers tend to wear suits but people in marketing do not. People who work for software firms don't wear suits but people who work for ball-bearing manufacturers do.

Details I've observed about suits at work:

People who wear double breasted suits are always overweight. They're also usually stagnant in their jobs - either incompetent and not getting any further up the ladder, or have reach a comfortable but static level of seniority.

Younger guys wear navy, older guys wear grey.

Shirts are actually more important than suits.

There are incredibly powerful fads in the business world for shirts. The double cuff first took off in the late 90s and still predominates. The wide opening collar became popular around 2000 but is fading out these days, and a high collar seems to be more popular now. Late 90s was all brightly coloured shirts, giving way to the checked or gingham shirt between 99 and 02. O2-04 has been more about purples and pinks with that kind of very fine check pattern that you can hardly see.

There was a brief thing for chalkstripe about 3 years ago that thankfully passed quickly.

Have a (suit-free) meeting to go to now, but find this thread really interesting.

You should post the essay Anna...

Tryphena Absent

14:57 / 14.07.04

I'm not happy with the structure of the finished article at all but I did write it in 4 hours and I hit my word limit so I guess I can't complain that much. The general ideas I'm good with, it's my writing I'm a bit down on, anyway it lives here if you want to take a look.

Tryphena Absent

15:09 / 14.07.04

Alison Lurie is quite difficult to get your hands on at the moment, I think she's a little out of fashion. My favourite theory is Elizabeth Wilson's Adorned in Dreams but I think she doesn't always take it far enough, she assumes that Dandyism begins in England and I thoroughly disagree with that premise because I don't think that fashion trends are that clear cut. Part of my argument is a point that Grant makes I've read that in the years following the French Revolution, it was considered fashionable to have tattered clothes. It's the advent of trousers as a worn item that make Dandyism for me and thus the roots have to be in France.

that seems to indicate that that's the first time utilitarian clothing became an object of fashionability

Yeah because it's completely tied in to industrialism, the need to move comfortably around these new machines and social change reflected in the way that we ritualistically adorn our bodies. I suppose the first time that its actually conceived of completely is only with Chanel because she was intent on women dressing in this fashion as well and used materials like flannel that had previously only been kept for undergarments. That's interesting because the trend is almost a hundred years old by the time that its vocalised and I think it probably relates directly to Womens Suffrage which recognises what's happening because it has to.

Tryphena Absent

15:14 / 14.07.04

I think the idea that people at the top of companies wear T-shirts while their inferiors are dressed in suits is interesting because it's so hierachical, it's kind of-- the upper classes are free to dress as they wish while the middle class must adhere to their natural uniform. I think it must say something culturally, I don't know enough about Asian dress/society to really understand it though. I'd love to hear what you think...

You know I'm beginning to think we could all write a book on this.

No star here laces

05:19 / 15.07.04

Aah, actually that was a general point, and more based on UK companies.

In Asia, I can split out the countries into suit-wearing and non suit-wearing nations.

Suits:

China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, India, Singapore

Not suits:

Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia

In Japan, suit-wearing is virtually an art-form. I can't read all the subtleties but you could probably write a three-volume text on the semiotics of it all.

I personally use suits as a blunt instrument. If I want to really brow-beat a provincial client with my superior western knowledge and skills, on goes the suit. Worn with unironed, untucked, artfully crumpled vintage shirt.

More sure of myself, more professional and far far more authoritative.

But the interesting thing about the suit is that it has to be done right to achieve the power effect. Fuck it up and you look like an awkward student on his way to an interview. It must fit beautifully. You must look comfortable in it. The tie and shirt must scream "money" or "taste".

So the suit is a two-edged sword. If you're seen to be dressing up for someone, it's a placatory, submissive gesture. It says "I bend my will to the ways of the corporate sphere and hope that one day I may be at home here".

What do P Diddy's suits mean? The ultimate response to accusations of being a sell-out?

What about the "Nigerian suit" as I call it? The flashy, shiny type that can be picked up in hackney for around 60 quid...

I thought the piece was interesting, but it felt like you hadn't quite figured out your conclusion when you wrote it - the topic seems like it needs more space I guess.

The area I'd love for you to expand on is the transition from 1940s (suit as universal clothing for all) to 1970s (suit as the uniform of business/politics).

Also, it occurs to me that the suit having progressed from dandy-->utilitarian-->traditional has now come full circle through to "dandy" again.

Tryphena Absent

14:36 / 15.07.04

Well I'll see what I can do, I was most unhappy with my leaps from paragraph to paragraph but I just couldn't sort it out in time.

Fuck it up and you look like an awkward student on his way to an interview. It must fit beautifully. You must look comfortable in it. The tie and shirt must scream "money" or "taste".

This reminds me of an ex-boyfriend. I was a student, I'd just started university and I'd been going out with him for about four months. He had an interview in the area and arrived at my Halls in a three piece suit and it was terrifying. All of the men I'd known who were my age looked like they were playing at dressing up and in walked someone I was dating looking... authoritative. Not so much taste (too conservative) as money, I don't think I realised that his family was properly loaded until I looked at that suit. I just stared at him until he asked what the matter was. It was also the first time I realised how powerful clothes are.

16:15 / 15.07.04

I really like your conclusion that the left will need to discover a new form of clothing... maybe especially because I can't fathom what this might be. What if the suit can't be subverted, you know? Then what is to be done? Interesting.

16:50 / 15.07.04

I wonder if the Gap-style (sloppy chic? lazy neutrals?) has undermined the possibility uniform of the left.

Or, by extending that thought a little, if the concept of a uniform is a right-leaning idea to begin with.

This analysis of the suit: More sure of myself, more professional and far far more authoritative.
reminds me of one of my suit filecards. There's a friend of the family, an old National Enquirer buddy of my dad's, whose distinctive thing around the newsroom was that he *always* wore a suit. Because it made him a killer, see -- in interview with politicians or when hounding celebrities and/or their PR people, he carried this authority thing with him. Even on the phone, I think. It was like suddenly he wasn't this scandalhound muckraker, he was like a lawyer or something. Both to the subject of his attention and to himself. Uniform as weapon.

12:54 / 30.11.05

Why Can't Anyone Tell I'm Wearing This Business Suit Ironically?

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