Sorry JPMorgan, smart guys still wear suits
If the bankers abandon it, who will be left to support the ancient and august institution of the men’s suit? The lawyers? People at funerals? Moustache-waxing hipsters? Not constituencies the world’s designers and tailors will want to depend upon.
So this week’s news from JPMorgan, the world’s leading bank by many measures, constitutes a moment in the history of clothing. In a memo to its 237,000 staff this week, the banking institution announced a relaxation in its dress code. Staff are now urged to wear “business casual”, to reflect changes “in the way we work”.
Whoever makes these sort of decisions at the bank — likely some crank in HR — let it be known that a polo shirt and trousers is just fine, all week long. Casual Friday has engineered a hostile takeover and consolidated the other four days.
This seems the right moment, then, to consider why anyone should bother wearing a suit. The first and probably the most important reason is to look like one’s father.
My dad put on a suit every day and off to work he went. Therefore the fact that I put on a suit every day implies that I am an adult, capable of successfully doing grown up things, sometimes for hours at a stretch. There may be people who do not need props to convince themselves they are not, in fact, fumbling 12-year-olds committing a fraud against the legitimate world. If there are, I congratulate them. Formal clothes prop us up, and we need it.
The second reason to wear a suit can be summed up this way: it is a great excuse to put on a tie. A suit is a more or less complicated garment designed to be worn with a tie, and the tie is designed to go with the shirt. And so begins a game of self-expression played with multiple pieces.
A whole set of emotional and social and aesthetic messages can be sent, with brashness or subtlety. Move to a smaller set of pieces and you have gone from chess to checkers.
This is the point that Mark Zuckerberg (left) misses. He says he wears the same sort of grey T-shirt and jeans every day so he can focus on more important decisions.
Nonsense. If he had a sense of style, picking out his clothes would be a pleasure, not an additional chore. And all sorts of wardrobes can be set, as it were, on automatic pilot when needed. Zuckerberg is simply saying that clothes are not important. Yet they are.
Many people, especially but not exclusively men, roll their eyes at this notion. This is bigotry. Many of these same people read deep meaning and importance into, for example, a bunch of people kicking a ball around. And they are absolutely right to do so.
As the point is expressed in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work.”
Getting dressed is as noble a game as any, and as meaningful. If Zuckerberg made similar remarks about the food he ate, or the architecture of his office, or the pictures on his walls, he would be widely, and rightly, dismissed as a philistine.
This is why the increasingly ubiquitous suit-with-no-tie is a mistake. It reduces the number of available moves in the game. You cannot loosen a tie if you wear no tie; you cannot roll up your sleeves if you have no sleeves.
The last reason is related but not identical. We wear suits to work because the work we do is important. My main job, for example, is to oversee a daily column that says mostly nasty things about the way companies are run. If I am going to get paid to be rude about things that other people have sweated and bled over, burning the better part of their short lives, and maintain the pretence that my words matter, I think I can wear a suit while I do it. The people I write about deserve the gesture.
This last argument could be flipped on its head. What everyone wants, after the crisis, is for banking to be less important, less well paid, less risky, less glamorous. If bank-as-utility is the goal, then is not a banker dressed like a plant manager (and paid like one) just what we need? A compelling possibility but, to me, not as compelling as this message: put on a suit, hotshot, it’s other people’s money.
I like polo shirts. I wear one almost every Friday, and find it a nice change from the other days of the week. A work wardrobe consisting entirely of khakis and polos would have the important and egalitarian advantage of being cheap to buy and maintain, and would leave us with a bit more time to think about other things. The idea that nothing would be lost in the transition is, however, plainly wrong.