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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

I worked in a Wall St. firm in the 90's and wore suit and tie every day, even though my job was neither customer facing nor even in New York.

I quickly realized I didn't mind it at all once I found correctly fitting shirts. If you consider a tie to be too constricting, you have the wrong shirt.

Even as borderline OCD (self diagnosed, so likely wrong), I never found particular clothes to be a hinderance to me typing (I'm a software dev), and I'm one of those guys that can't stand tags in t-shirts and rip them out. I think 90% of the angst over "comfortable" clothes is a learned cultural thing, and overblown. IMO.

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I don’t think it’s really about the clothes being uncomfortable, but just the idea of being forced to wear certain kinds of clothes

Are you sure you aren't just unconsciously repeating the same prejudice, but from a different click?

How will the people around you react to you using a suit? If it's badly, you are as much forced to wear a certain kind of clothes as the GP was.

Anyway, just because there is a dressing code, it doesn't mean that the culture normally associated with it dominates. Those are two different things, where one is a huge problem, and the other mostly irrelevant. It's always better if you react to problems that are rally there, instead of noisy proxies.

That's a valid point, but all of us, every day, are subject to rules, mores, peer pressure, etc. No one TRULY does exactly what they want, all the time.

Different people can value these rules in different amounts, and to your point, I didn't value "what I'm wearing" as much as some other people do, so I get you.

Plus the expense of maintaining two different wardrobes.

The trad thing is that your old clothes become your casual clothes, mostly. Except athletic clothes—but half those are dress or business-casual now, anyway, like OCBDs and polos—most of our modern athletic clothes counted as underwear, before, if they existed at all. And it doesn't really work for full-on formal wear like dinner jackets or morning dress.

A bunch of suiting trends come from this. Suit jacket with ruined pants? Now it's a blazer, so, casual wear. Handmedown worn 3-button suit that you're wearing casually at college, with the top button pretty much permanently unbuttoned? You've just invented the 2-roll-3 jacket style. And so on.

We've replaced this behavior with simply having all our clothes be disposable-cheap. Mending a hole and adding patches to keep wearing something's not really worth it when it cost $20 to begin with.

A(nother) good point. In my case the compensation adequately covered it; I guess some others' don't, which was a blind spot in my post.

To defend myself a bit, though, most conversations I see around this topic are referring to comfort.

Agreed. For someone whose experience of suits is the ill-fitting obligation for the occasional wedding or funeral, it will be shocking and unbelievable to read that a custom cut dress shirt is more comfortable than a t-shirt, and suit pants, soft and silk lined, more comfortable than jeans.

It might be shocking to realize that not all body types fit well into a suit, regardless of how well tailored it is. I used to be tall and lanky, great for a suit. Then age happened, and now I'm much more round that beanpole. Nothing fits well, and I've tried custom shirts etc. I just look like a well dressed, round person. I'm not more comfortable at all, in fact the opposite.

Plop me in a pair of shorts with a t-shirt or better, a hoodie and I feel great.

Interesting. I've been told that the suit is so ubiquitous over history and nationalities, because it flatters older and portly gentlemen more than other items.

I would say in the last generation, we’ve really had a ton of incredible new textiles be developed. Spandex and its blends in particular has added a lot of comfort in clothing, and wasn’t even that widespread ~15 years ago in comparison to the degree it is now.

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