All suits are the same

[fxh]

There's more to say but it's 2am here and I'm in bed on iPad which is awkward and I have to be up at 6am for an all day annual Strategic Planning for one of the boards I'm on.

Fwiw
I'll be wearing, stone chinos neat clean ironed, button down butchers striped navy blue on white shirt, casual unlined navy blue cotton G4 type jacket , brown suede shoes, faded rose socks, red wind jacket over if cool. No tie. No pocket square.

 

[yachtie]



I'd blame that more on the emphasis on casual 'n' cheap than on hidebound groupthink.

May start there but it soon becomes the forum ethos. People are posting as gospel a set of "rules" for "acceptable dress" that don't exist anywhere else but the poster's heads. It's obvious that they have little experience but that doesn't seem to matter much. With a lot of the old timers gone, there's not much of a corrective for that tendency.

 

[yachtie]



There's more to say but it's 2am here and I'm in bed on iPad which is awkward and I have to be up at 6am for an all day annual Strategic Planning for one of the boards I'm on.

Fwiw
I'll be wearing, chinos, neat clean ironed, button down butchers striped navy blue on white shirt, casual unlined cotton G4 type jacket , brown suede shoes, faded rose socks, red wind jacket over if cool.

Stylin'!

G'nite mate.

 

[DocHolliday]



May start there but it soon becomes the forum ethos. People are posting as gospel a set of "rules" for "acceptable dress" that don't exist anywhere else but the poster's heads. It's obvious that they have little experience but that doesn't seem to matter much. With a lot of the old timers gone, there's not much of a corrective for that tendency.

Maybe I just haven't seen this. Haven't been around much lately. There's a lot of bad information being posted, but there always has been, and I tend to gloss over it.

I agree the departure of some of our senior posters worsens the signal-to-noise ratio.

 

[Bounder]



I feel like a lot of posts in this thread are railing against a SF that no longer exists. The conservative business dress thread came about because WAYW had become a free-for-all, and it was promptly beaten into the ground. The "conservative groupthink" of yesteryear has been replaced with the equally doctrinaire -- and equally unrealistic -- belief that the single most important factor in choosing our dress should be to please our whims and egos.

+1

The conservative business dress thread -- which I hope will be revived -- offered some stellar examples of how conservative business dress can be anything but boring. When the analogy first occurred to me, I thought it was rubbish. But I think there really is an argument to be made that dressing well is an art form no less than, say, music.

In fact, the analogy to music is a pretty good one. Classical clothing is characterized by variations within certain accepted forms that follow, certain more or less, accepted rules. "Romantic" clothing pays homage to classical forms but follows the rules less and less. Eventually, I suppose, you reach modern clothing which discards the rules and forms entirely and strives, above all, to be "different."

Some of us prefer Mozart to Stravinsky.

May start there but it soon becomes the forum ethos. People are posting as gospel a set of "rules" for "acceptable dress" that don't exist anywhere else but the poster's heads. It's obvious that they have little experience but that doesn't seem to matter much. With a lot of the old timers gone, there's not much of a corrective for that tendency.

You have a point here. But there are rules. In fact, there must be rules. Otherwise, we have nothing to discuss. If everything is purely subjective, i.e., "If you like it, wear it!" then we might as well be talking about our favorite flavor of ice cream. "I like chocolate!" . . . "Really? I prefer vanilla." There really isn't a lot to say after that.

 

[NORE]

Moral of the story:

I wish I had a dollar for each post that states "I wish I could wear that".

Please, get some balls people.

 

[yachtie]

But I think there really is an argument to be made that dressing well is an art form no less than, say, music.

May start there but it soon becomes the forum ethos. People are posting as gospel a set of "rules" for "acceptable dress" that don't exist anywhere else but the poster's heads. It's obvious that they have little experience but that doesn't seem to matter much. With a lot of the old timers gone, there's not much of a corrective for that tendency.

You have a point here. But there are rules. In fact, there must be rules. Otherwise, we have nothing to discuss. If everything is purely subjective, i.e., "If you like it, wear it!" then we might as well be talking about our favorite flavor of ice cream. "I like chocolate!" . . . "Really? I prefer vanilla." There really isn't a lot to say after that.

[rant]
Point being that the "rules" are not prescriptive. Like any aesthetic endevor yes there are "rules" relating to porportion, color etc, and there are social constructs that determine a range of acceptability in a given situation. No more. what goes on here and on other forums often lacks an appreciation of aesthetic requirements and instead attempts to replace them with rigid rule sets that do not really exist.[/rant]

 

[ldegeneve]



Good God, have you never heard of sarcasm?

Ha, I wish. I doubt that post was sarcastic.

 

[ldegeneve]



[rant]
Point being that the "rules" are not prescriptive. Like any aesthetic endevor yes there are "rules" relating to porportion, color etc, and there are social constructs that determine a range of acceptability in a given situation. No more. what goes on here and on other forums often lacks an appreciation of aesthetic requirements and instead attempts to replace them with rigid rule sets that do not really exist.[/rant]

I applaud you, sir.

 

[RSS]

1. How many suits do you have that are not Navy or Grey? Way too many.
2. When do you wear them? Work, pleasure, traveling, theatre, dining, you name it.
3. What is your 3rd/4th suit? I don't assign them numbers ... but a favorite suit a Richard Anderson make up in the house tweed of biscuit (see photo below with coat worn as odd coat)
4. What do you regret about that nth suit? Regret? I have no regrets when it comes to matters sartorial.
5. What do you like about it? The diagonal pinstripes.

 

[RSS]



Please, get some balls people.

I doubt you meant this for me. I'm thinking diagonal pinstripe.

 

[Holdfast]

There is obviously a very broad variety of suit; small details add up to big aesthetic difference. The OP is likely being wilfully obtuse in order to be provocative, which has clearly succeeded given the length of this thread already.

I see the usual rather banal discussion about SF's dress philosophy has reared its ugly head again. I struggle to figure out why this topic is so unendingly fascinating. A desire for a higher standard (by whatever measure) for the forum as a whole strikes me as a pointless objective. Each individual takes and gives what they wishes from the board. Trying to guide it down a particular direction would be a remarkably thankless, unenjoyable and frustrating task.

Boards are rarely actively guided unless they are very, very small. Otherwise, ideas ebb and flow based on the sum total of the membership with various trends rising and falling over time in a dynamic way based on those interactions but gaining a meme-like directionality of their own. Prominent or popular members can temporarily nudge it down a particular road, but only as long as they continue to actively apply that pressure; when they stop posting, the board finds a new equilibrium. It's like using marketing, or politics, to influence ideas in that respect. Isn't it exhausting - and unrewarding - to constantly try to push a particular position? Then again, I've never really empathised with activism of any sort, so I guess I just don't appreciate this mindset; I never seem able to muster up the sustained enthusiasm for it.

More generally, it seems to me that there are two broad groups of people wearing suits: 1) those who like wearing suits; 2) those who have to wear suits.

Where only 1 applies, you have a broader range of outfits and therefore wider scope for extravagant failure (or success). Where only 2 applies, you have poor quality, monotonous outfits. Where both 1 and 2 apply you have a narrower range of outfits, but more opportunity to aesthetically refine the look. SF currently attracts a mix of all these people, and why not, really? I suspect the WAYWRN thread is more populated by people falling into 1 but not 2 (and actually like that only 1 but not 2 applies), whereas the conservative business dress aesthetic generally tends to appeal more to those falling into both 1 and 2 (and also those who wish both 1 and 2 applied to them).

Put more simply, if you enjoy the entertainment/amusement value that tailored clothing offers, you'll tend to peacock. If you care about appearing elegant in tailored clothing, you'll prefer a more stealthy way of dressing. Either way, I still don't really understand why it matters so much which direction others dress in. It's simply a different aesthetic driven by both a different starting point in terms of personality and a different end-point in terms of what outcomes you want to achieve with your clothes.

 

[Sator]



I feel like a lot of posts in this thread are railing against a SF that no longer exists.

Considering that it doesn't exist the OP with 18 posts managed to feel a group pressure to conform to wearing the old grey SB suit as everyone else. Next, other fairly new members chimed in to confirm that they too had felt this group pressure.

Not that it's a bad thing to have at one suit that is as fantastically boring as possible in case you are in a social situation where you need your clothes to get out of the way, or else to own bespoke suits where the only one thing that is interesting is the razor sharp perfection of fit.

That said, we are meant to live in an age of unprecedented social and spiritual freedom, so it's kind of bizarre to find a conservatism that is even greater than that of the Victorian era in ours taste in business dress. So I think that this drive to conformity to wearing conservative grey suits doesn't really reflect the age that we live in. I think that this is the reason why tailored clothing is not as widely worn today as jeans. It's even an insult to refer to someone as being "a suit" ie a dull conservative business type.

We expect modernity and tasteful creativity in how our cars are styled or our interior décor. Yet, when it comes to business dress, modernity and creativity become dirty words. The very characterisation of the slightest departure from the grey suited conservative business attired to be a wholesale acceptance of Tom Browne and other catwalk bizarria really doesn't help either. In reality, there is still a massive unexplored area on the internet of tasteful and imaginative creativity in tailored clothing.

 

[KObalto]

Great post, HF.

 

[SamSpade]

I have to agree with the OP.
Having spent inordinate amount of time and money on "proper" dress, experimenting with multiple brands and fits, it finally downed on me what an extremly stupid waste of time and resources this is. We are grown up men, for crying out loud, yet we spend our waking hours obsessing about inconsequential little details instead of slaying dragons, solving world hunger or whatever.

Sure, I love a good suit as much as the next guy. But, after a point, all suits are indeed the same. Or more precisely, the cost and the general hassle to aquire/deal with them grow at a rate far in excess of the rate of real quality improvement in the suit. The one Brioni I have is about 10 times the cost of my Jos A Bank. But visually it is only about 2 times better feeling/looking, if that.

As far as I am concerned, a run of the mill Brooks Brothers suit (which is already too rich for 99.999% of the world's population) is as nice as a suit needs to be. My advice to any newbs would be: don't follow the steps of the decadent sel-appointed obsessive pseudo-aristocracy. get the basic fit and proportions right, and find something better to do with your life.

also, there is a special place in hell for GQ editors and style bloggers