Suits are the work dress in consulting, financial services, pretty much anything where you're clients demand respect and are not in IT (IT and personal visual aestethics have an inverse relationship, in any big company you can easily tell who is in IT).
Try to attend a management meeting in Europe, China, Japan without a suit.
Within the suit world people from the US are also highly visible as the art of fashion seems to have been lost. While the rest of the world went with tighter forms, US men still wear balloon shaped trousers, as if the 80s never stopped. And the number one tell are the shoes. Italians shape the shoe world, pointy and long have been the way to go for some time now - but US men go in with big black round things, often not even polished properly. This goes up to CEO level.
There are certain elements of a push-back right now in the US as well, the first one being the success of the tv-series Mad Med which is a big advertisement for fashion and representative clothing. The second being a resurgence of elegant, masculine fashion - see blogs like the Sartorialist for a glimpse into that: http://www.thesartorialist.com/
A well-fitted suit does not signal money, it signals TASTE. Which is very hard to talk about in tech circles. Like looking at a well set up VIM instance, it tells you about the owner's habits.
You don't even have to go as far as management meeting. In Japan, if you have any sort of white-collar job (with few exceptions in tech companies and research departments), you wear a suit.
Not to say I didn't see nice suits, I saw plenty, just saying that your average sarariman sure isn't buying $4000 bespoke suits and frankly I would doubt $400.
Why do you think the suit is dead?
I wear a suit (not always, but often enough to have an opinion).
I've never bought an expensive suit, but I nor do I buy cheap suits. I guess I generally spend around $500.
I work with people who spend $2000 on suits though. These aren't bespoke, but are from nice fabrics and cut very well (eg, Hugo Boss etc). I'm no suit expert, but I can tell the difference.
I can't say I've seen any particular decrease in suit wearing over the past 15 years I've been working, although ties are less common that they used to be.
In my experience location and field of work makes a bigger difference to suit wearing than anything else.
They wore incredibly well (for several years, I rotated the same 3 suits and 12 dress shirts on an every weekday basis).
There is also a huge difference in comfort between off-the-shelf and made to measure.
If I had much use for a suit these days, I would not hesitate to have a few made to measure, along with a new set of shirts.
Don't know about other places, but at least in NoCal high status people don't wear suits. Since the only function of a suit is status signaling, it seems just a matter of time until everyone else catches up and suits will be replaced by bike jerseys or whatever.
The suit is very much alive in NY, in London, the entire legal world, and in many other places. That's just during the day.
For formal events / outings it is SF that is the extreme outlier. In the rest of the country if you are going to a fancy restaurant, a wedding, an awards dinner or the like you wear a suit. The original rational for the suit actually still holds for these occasions - it removes the need to constantly chase the latest fashions, as many woman and all hipsters must.
When I bought my wedding suit, my fiancee dragged me to multiple shops and eventually had a lengthy discussion with a Saville Row tailor over whether to have one button or three buttons (two? I have no idea), as she believed one button suits would be coming back into fashion on the higher end, but most of the brands did not offer one button suits at the time. She was right. She had similar opinions about the cut...
It's definitely true that there is status signaling involved, whether it's conscious or not, although I would hesitate to say that it's the suit's only purpose (and in my case, that's a side effect, not the purpose). You could make that argument about any clothing if you go that far.
But...I've definitely noticed being treated subtly better when I dress for occasions. Go to a nice restaurant dressed for an occasion, and you'll tend be treated like it's an occasion (obviously your milage may vary - act like a jerk and you'll be treated like one, no matter what you're wearing).
We all have different experiences I guess, but the further West you go, the less formal the attire, and California isn't really as "extreme" as you may think.
Ultimately it's just a cultural difference, and searching for rationality behind it isn't going to bear fruit.
In Southern California though the suit is totally impractical, unless you like to be drenched is sweat. Most of the world is the same at < 35 degrees latitude.
I'd go so far to say the suit is a minor cause of global warming ... all those high rises with no windows running AC all day. Mostly unnecessary.
There seems to be a kind of inverse snobbery about smart dress at the moment, as if the 50-year-old CEOs of huge tech firms think that by taking off their tie we're going to think they're one of us, or the 25-year-old founder of a trendy start-up is going to convince us of their business savvy by wearing a T-shirt and trainers while giving a presentation.
Since the only function of a suit is status signaling
Really? I happen to think that smart dress looks better on me than casual anyway, but even without that, suits are fairly practical garments. A well-made suit is comfortable to wear all day. Suits have an easily removable jacket if you're hot, yet provide useful shelter for the elements if it's cold/wet outside. They have plenty of handy pockets for pens, phones, etc.
Your argument appears wrong because you assume the definition of a 'smart dress' involves wearing a suit.
The definition of 'smart dressing' has been changing rapidly. The very fact that demands for suits is less, shows the trend of clothing around the world.
Back during the days of slavery/aristocracy- costly clothing was automatically a status signal. What you are seeing currently are just echoes of that culture.
I would consider it stupid to spend so much on costly clothing. I am hiring people to write program, not for modeling.
But that breaks apart in bigger environments, and out comes the suits.
Jack Dorsey has whole articles written about the suits he wears. I think he is high status however you measure it.
Anyway, it is also function signalling. Suited people are those people who talk to other suited people.
Don't know about other places, but at least in NoCal high status people don't wear suits.
Yes, I understand that.
I even said "In my experience location and field of work makes a bigger difference to suit wearing than anything else."
Somewhat surprisingly for those of us in technology, the Silicon Valley look hasn't proved very influential in the fashion world.
No, it's not. Just as you like hacking / biking / whatever, many people enjoy looking good by wearing well-made clothing.
If anything, I suspect people on average are spending more on clothes around here.
I agree that the interesting changes will come out of the made-to-measure world. Considering the difference in comfort (not to mention look!) that properly-fitting clothing provides, I'd be extremely interested in getting a nice made-to-measure suit if I had the sort of job or social calendar that would give me opportunities to wear it... and while I don't expect to ever be in the sort of job or circles that would require a suit regularly, I definitely look forward to an economical, quick(ish) way of getting a nice-fitting suit. Last time I bought a suit I had to wait over a month for alterations to be done at the department store anyway, so if someone can come up with a way of reducing made-to-measure turnaround to a month...
And then let me gets khakis and less-formal shirts made that way too... I buy a lot more of those than suits.
I have several MTM shirts and suits, and honestly I don't think it's really worth it. For a couple reasons, I'm much happier these days finding a brand that fits me off the rack and having it altered if necessary.
1. The grand promise of MTM is the perfect fit, but your first one or two attempts are almost certainly going to leave you with a garment that doesn't fit. At best, this requires more fittings, trips to the tailor, and time. At worst, you're stuck paying for a garment that you will never wear and cannot return.
2. MTM will always be more expensive. For example, Indochino suits are pretty cheap ($400), but for the same level of construction and fabric you're looking at a a $200 suit from Men's Warehouse. J. Crew sells $130 Thomas Mason shirts, and to get the same shirt MTM from my Hong Kong tailor costs me $200.
It doesn't make the suit any less dead.
And as much as I'm fashion averse, I've also found myself increasingly frustrated by the state of the fashion industry and lack of reasonable alternatives to actually take a mild interest in the article.
If I wore suits I would have a bespoke one made, but as it is, bespoke women's clothing is more complicated financially - you simply wouldn't wear the same dress as often as you would the same suit, probably by an order of magnitude.
Lastly. Men in suits. Hot. Men in bespoke suits. Blisteringly so.
I grew up in suits, or at least in jackets and ties. I've worn bespoke when I could afford it, including (then) casual tweeds. But in my youth, I was a more-or-less off the rack kind of guy. "Off the rack", in those days, meant that somebody would spend the better part of an hour with a marking chalk playing with the lay of the collar, the rotation of the shouders, the vent(s) and armholes (to the extent possible), and so on -- and that's in addition to the expected tweaks to the sleeve length, moving cuff buttons, hemming and cuffing trousers, altering the waist and stride to fit, and so on. That was part of the price of a $400 suit in the '80s, even at a chain men's wear store. Extra-cost alterations were things that went right down to the structure of the garment.
I was absolutely shocked to see what my wife had to put up with. Not only were the prices way out of line (at the same price level, things like seam finishing and so on are nowhere near as well-attended-to in women's wear as in men's wear, even if the garments themselves are comparable -- say something like a blazer). Then everything was extra, including the stuff that absolutely has to happen, like hemming a skirt or a pair of slacks. Ridiculous. You ought to throw yourselves a little revolution.
Your 1% comment doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. Are you saying that only households making over $340k a year[1] would spend that much on a suit? My first job out of college was for $28k a year in a city. I had to spend much of that first year buying $600-800 suits because that's what I was expected to wear. I have friends that make what I make now and gladly drop twice what I would on a suit. It doesn't have anything to do with income.
I believe this was mentioned elsewhere, but a $4,000 suit isn't mainly about income or wealth, it's about taste. Pick up any $4,000 suit from a custom clothier and hang it up next to a $350 suit from Men's Wearhouse. You will absolutely be able to tell the difference from the other side of the room.
[1] http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/top-1-percent-earn.asp...
No one wears suits anymore and those who do just want cheap garbage, that's pretty much the point of the article.
The bespoke suit is the new Mac Pro, cheap to those who value it and overpriced to those who have no use for it, hence virtually no bottom line. (Mac Pros aren't a $24B business, but to those who desire them there is no substitute).
Get your t-shirts tailored and you'll start to see the value tailors can provide if you're the sort of person willing to spend money to look better.
I've had no difficulty finding french cuffs here -- have you tried Moore's?
Eventually I found a couple at Metrotown, and a whole stash at the YWCA thrift on main, walked out with 5 for $25.
If anything, bespoke clothing is doing better than it has in almost a century. China's incredible boom has led to a whole new crop of millionaires with an insatiable desire for western luxury goods. Suits, purses, jewelry, wristwatches, everything. LVMH's spectacular profits are a good proof of this.
People have been saying "the suit is dead" for a number of years now. Yeah, maybe it is, maybe we will never go back to Mad Men days of suits in the office and dinner jackets at night, maybe the suit as a consumer good is on its last legs. But the bespoke suit, the suit as a piece of craftsmanship is doing better than ever.
Barney Stinson would beg to differ: http://vimeo.com/17152345
bespoke tailoring doesn't scale.
The suit is dead for any number of reason, dittos bespoke clothing.
$4000 is several times what I spend on clothes in a year. It's several times what I spend on clothes in several years. There's a far less expensive option that's highly satisficing. Suits, once an inexpensive, practical, standardized alternative to more ornate and expensive clothing, are now the expensive, frequently impractical attire. The lead time to purchase is too long. And a far lower grade of tailoring is more than sufficient for virtually any occasion. That's basic facts.
There are exceptions -- people for whom the expense is neither extravagent nor unneccessary. It's a pretty small crowd, well within the top 1%, and probably more like the top 0.01%. Then divide by two, because, well, very few women wear suits (though women's fashion is its own discussion).
As TFA notes, bespoke tailoring doesn't scale. And it strongly suggests a rather fragile relationship between the garment and the wearer -- I can change in multiple of 25 separate measurements within a few months to a years time -- does this render a suit poor-fitting?
The made-to-measure alternative exists, and for many or most, it's a more-than-acceptable alternative for either formal or casual clothing. With correctly chosen measuring points, and if necessary, some additional tailoring, garments can be made to fit quite well. Cloth is pretty fungible. Sticking to conservative fashions, styles, and cuts means you'll have something that will wear well for years. And in a world in which off-the-rack sizing is increasingly problematic (aggressively styled cuts with little sizing leeway result in more frustrated customers), it's increasingly an option. There are a few vendors in the space, though I feel it's still waiting for its true visionary.