When my uncle died, the official dress code for the funeral was camouflage and/or Pittsburgh Steelers gear. Which was far more appropriate for honoring him than dress coats and ties could have been.
Yes, exactly! I know what “business attire” is. I know what “casual” is. I don’t know what “business casual” is. If you tell me “business casual”, I’ll err on the side of “business”, rather than on the side of “casual”, and wear a tie.
My father died in 1996, just as the suit and tie culture was collapsing in most businesses. He mocked me one day for going to work in khakis and a patterned short sleeve shirt, telling me I should always dress as well as my clients. I told him I started dressing like that after I called on a client - a vice president of a Fortune 500 company, no less - who was wearing khakis and a polo shirt, and who literally mocked me for wearing a suit.
In the U.S., in most contexts, since about 1999.
I’m not even joking; when I started my business career in 1989, business attire (suit and tie) was de rigeur for men, for the vast majority* of white-collar jobs. By the mid '90s, many businesses started to adopt “casual Fridays,” and by the end of the '90s, many companies which had been suit-and-tie just a few years earlier had gone to all-the-time casual.
I’ve worked in advertising since 2000, and have visited many clients’ offices since then; I can list on one hand the number of those client companies which still required business attire.
And, outside of my business life, I can attest that most men I know rarely, if ever, wear a suit or a tie, and a fair number of them don’t even own a tie anymore.
That said, certain fields (law and medicine, for two examples) seem to still be more formal, and more likely to still expect men in those fields to wear a business suit (or at least jacket) and tie.
*- In some areas, like California, suits and ties seemed to be phased out even earlier than that.
Not in banking, but one of my coworkers wears colorful suits. This is similar to one of his that he wears regularly:
The C suite may wear jackets, but ties are only for press conferences, shareholder events, and customers.
Your story made me curious for data, and it is hard to find anything definitive except many articles cite the same report by the Men’s Dress Furnishings Association that tie sales in the U.S. indeed peaked in 1995 but fell into a precipitous decline afterwards.
What I meant was that one should be able to come up with ways of wearing a necktie that do not equate to conservative business dress— maybe it can be casual, too, or simply not a big deal (I did find, incidentally, a New York Times article from 2007 reporting a resurgence in tie-wearing among young hipsters at the time.)
Ties just feel so… arbitrary. Suit jackets make sense: the broaden the shoulders, narrow the waist and hide the butt. But what good is a tie? It does nothing for the male form. But King Louis the14th of France decided that men should wear a piece of cloth around their neck, and ever since then, we’ve all done it.
The modern form acts as a diagrammatic pointer. “Penis located here.”
(Note that those unmasculine egghead academics tend to favor knit ties with squared off ends.)
So Trump’s tie is overcompensation?
To me, suit jacket without a tie seems less formal than dress shirt with a tie. And, of course, suit jacket with t-shirt is rather informal, probably at the same level of unbuttoned, patterned dress shirt over t-shirt.
The official answer (based on comments from Chris Christie) is that Trump thinks it’s slimming. Somehow.
There are … alternative interpretations, from which I will refrain so as not to derail the otherwise unrelated thread.
About 20 years ago, I started a new job that required some customer contact. They sent me to Shenzen to visit a customer site and work with the engineers there. I figured I should wear a suit and tie since I was visiting a customer. My dad had worked for IBM, so it came naturally.
I was almost laughed out of the place. Everyone else was wearing jeans and t-shirts. So was I by the end of that trip.
I have been an electrical engineer for over 30 years and have worked with countless other engineers. No one ever wore a suit and/or tie, but almost exclusively jeans and t-shirt, dress shirt or sweater. (in Germany if that matters, mostly in IT or software engineering ). I think the only business here where a tie and sometimes a suit is still obligatory is the banking sector.
Everything about Trump is overcompensation.
I think there are two aspects here: the dress culture and your self-identity.
Generally-speaking, it’s best not to go too far over, or under, the dress culture where you work. It can draw attention, some of it negative (even for over-dressing; it might be considered a sign you are gunning for someone’s job) and make others focus too much on the outfit and not the person.
OTOH, if you have a particular style in which you are very comfortable, that it’s part of your personality, I’d say roll with it. My boss wears Hawaiian shirts every day. Even to go to something very formal, he will just wear a jacket over the top of a Hawaiian shirt. It never raises an eyebrow though because you can see how comfortable he is; it’s like it’s his skin.
When I had to wear a tie, it was slacks, button-down shirt with sleeves cuffed and the tie. Seemed to be an appropriate level of casualness.
As some have implied, a lot depends on your industry. My stepdad did HVAC sales and anything more formal than a short-sleeve business shirt would be unacceptable.
In the U.S., back in the 1960s (and maybe even into the '70s), we had the phenomenon of short-sleeved dress shirts, worn with ties. It’s a look that I have always associated with engineers, and these photos appear to be of engineers at NASA’s Mission Control, probably on the Apollo moon missions.
Sounds like jeans and t-shirt are formal business attire, and what will get you ridiculed or fired are radical items like cargo pants, Tibetan shirts, and cravats. (Or a business suit)
If you work near machinery, you may want a bow tie…
What can I say. My grandfather was a banker, and my father worked for IBM. I was the one who went bad and became an engineer.
I had to learn the proper dress code for the profession.