Comment by 6d0debc071 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 6d0debc071 | Hacker News Reader

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> Why do you people hate suits so much? What's wrong with wearing fine clothes and looking sharp?

I don't think they make you look sharp. They're a uniform, stick a suit on and you're just another person dressed in grey or black. It doesn't exactly do anything interesting with the eye.

Now, granted, there are various cuts of suit, and different pockets, ways of making them roll the shoulders to make you look broader or... but I don't really find that a well made suit is dramatically more interesting than a poorly made suit.

Perhaps to other people it is, and then I could understand better why people would choose to wear them if given a choice. But to myself a well made suit's not really more interesting than a grey T-shirt and has additional social connotations of being subservient to whoever's enforcing the dress code at the time.

> People who say we should do away with the suit are arguing to do away with centuries of evolution in professional men's attire.

What's the selection pressure supposed to be? Cutlery serves an obvious function. It's not clear what desirable function suits serve.

> It's not clear what desirable function suits serve.

It marks you as a team player, sort of like a sports uniform. I say it that way intentionally to show how a suit can be interpreted in both positive and negative ways.

Wearing a suit means you belong to the group that wears suits. Belonging can be overrated, but it seems many want to belong to the suit-wearing, six-figure-income clique.

Ah, good point. I didn't think of that :)

AKA "signalling". And it can and does go beyond "a suit" to include "the right suit / tailoring / etc".

Wearing "the wrong suit" can be about as bad as wearing no suit, from this perspective.

A suit doesn't make you look subservient - a t-shirt saying Hollister or Linux or some other corporate entity does.

> A suit doesn't make you look subservient

To me, they have that connotation. Fashion doesn't tend to be that regular outside of close-knit groups, and even within those groups there are differences that those within can pick up on. You might think that Amish all dress alike, but they really don't. Similarly all suits look more or less alike to me, despite the fact that I'm sure if I spent a lot of time looking at suits I'd start to notice more refined differences.

To have such a narrow variation as suits tend to constitute, among a group of fairly diverse individuals... that implies to me that there's a power effectively forcing that distribution on the group.

> a t-shirt saying Hollister or Linux or some other corporate entity does.

I don't see the relevance, no-one has to wear those things so the connotation of subservience isn't there. I suppose coming off the point of the fella above this fork you could view it as submission to a group norm, but I think the connotation's different there - less about overtly oppressive dominance.

In any case, I don't wear that sort of thing - don't like writing on my clothes, if someone's advertising with my body I want to be paid for it. Prefer patterns and pictures and nice rich colours.

It does make you look like you wasted hundreds of dollars on one outfit.

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