Happy Birthday to the Suit
economist.com
economist.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's worth mentioning that while everyone looks about the same, the people that want to really show their wallets continue to do so with flashy, expensive suits. Suits are an equalizer for everyone but the top.
I don't adjust my prices with regard to the suit. The rationale behind it feels like the rationale for eating a bag of chips while you're on a diet. I don't feel like wearing a suit today so I'll discount my personal value while asking to be paid. I don't feel like being on a diet today so I'll ignore it while attempting to control my weight.
Could you cite your assertions please?
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.
Nevertheless, how we present ourselves is inevitably influenced by what other people think of us. The amount of influence differs by situation. Though a programmer might dress in jeans and a T-shirt, he surely combs his hair.
Sure, our perceptions of appropriate dress change by the decade or so. But there's a difference between lowered expectations of what's appropriate (business casual instead of business) and no expectation. I think the later is what you're suggesting, that opinions of us are less influenced by our dress.
The former may be happening; but as others have stated, all fashion is cyclical. The later is, in the absolute sense, impossible. In the relative sense, it may sway, just like fashion, but we will always dress based on what other people will think, even if its to a lesser degree.
No, because expectations of appropriate dress vary radically by field. If you dress appropriately for a nightclub hostess job and then try to, say, get a job as a financial advisor or an enterprise software salesperson, you are likely doing yourself a disservice, even if the nightclub hostess getup is more flattering.
>Sure, our perceptions of appropriate dress change by the decade or so. But there's a difference between lowered expectations of what's appropriate (business casual instead of business) and no expectation. I think the later is what you're suggesting, that opinions of us are less influenced by our dress.
I'm suggesting that there are some situations where looking less attractive is more likely to help you obtain a positive business result.
The obvious examples are the trades, but I think there are certain, ah, stereotypes about programmers and sysadmins that also have a similar effect.
I mean, not always; but there are certain companies where a programmer showing up in a suit would be seen as almost as weird as an electrician showing up in a nice silk 3 piece.
>Though a programmer might dress in jeans and a T-shirt, he surely combs his hair.
I find this statement to be so far outside my experiences and expectations that I wonder... are you American?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.