You can get pretty close by yourself - presuming you are able to reach one arm overhead to touch between your shoulder blades. Of course, if something CRAZY happens and you ever happen to find yourself in proximity to another human being… 
Agreed. There is no harm in being slightly overdressed. At worst, people will think you have somewhere else to go after the meeting. Slightly undressed starts to send the message you didn’t care much about the meeting. Much depends on the region and business re these definitions. A friend of mine in banking in a big city said business casual/csual Friday meant loafers with socks and a button-down shirt without a tie with a lighter coloured suit than the usual black/dark blue/charcoal.
I may be mistaken, but as I recall from other threads @Reply is in his 40s but has been looking to impart a bit more…how should I say…stability and sophistication to his life and career?
It’s not meant to be a judgement. But IMHO, @Reply ideally should LOOK like someone who has been in his business a long time without looking like he’s TRYING to look like someone who has been in his business a long time.
Which can be a challenge in tech. Even most “East Coast Wall Street” folks don’t go around dressed like Harvey Spector in Suits. Mostly it’s a lot of dress pants and shirts with vest jackets.
The thing is, unless your workplace has a mandate to wear suits or a specific standard “business casual” I don’t think most people care how you dress so long as you look contemporary and put together.
This is indeed the thing: what’s the code where one is?
Huh! Okay, well, that would explain things, then. Maybe I had just bad sources. Thanks for the link!
I missed that the first time; thanks for the reminder! Just watched the clip 
I really like what he did with Michael:
Just a simple tweak to the shoulders (as you pointed out), belt, and pants made a noticeable difference! That’s exactly the kind of thing I was struggling to understand.
On the other hand, with this 26-year-old guy (Brian), I thought he looked much better before the makeover:
I can’t really verbalize why, though… I mean, granted, some part of this stuff will always just be subjective and cultural.
I didn’t actually realize there was a meaningful difference. I thought a tuxedo was just a suit with those bird tails, worn by butlers and such.
Ah, that explains it. Those dress uniforms do look great! Great recruiting tool, too, I bet
Wait, what? How did we get from here to there…? 
Maybe I misrepresented something. I don’t think I’m either a slob or a jerk at work (or anywhere else, I hope!). I just don’t dress fancy.
I work with programmers, who are not generally known for being particularly fashion-conscious.. When I go to the office, I already show up to work better dressed than most of them (including some of my bosses), but just in a fun way (as in patterned button-ups), not in a “I’m classier than you” way.
Maybe it’s a cultural thing too. Growing in East Asia, it was more a “nail that sticks out gets the hammer” kind of culture than a “squeaky wheel gets the grease” one. To this day, even after 20 years in the States, it is still hard for me to purposely draw attention to myself, even positively. It is therefore hard for me to dis-associate “fancy clothes” with “self-aggrandizing”. Being potentially seen as arrogant is therefore much more horrifying to me than being invisible.
So… comfortable is good. Fun is fine. A casual “I like your shirt!” is great (which I actually get quite frequently), but “Wow, who’s that impressively dressed gentleman” would be absolutely horrifying to me. What I ultimately want is well-fitting, not luxurious.
Well, first of all, I was saying that’s the attitude I had twenty years ago, not today
But also, in my particular industry and in my roles… clothes really are a secondary (or tertiary) consideration! If anything, there is more a danger of over-dressing than under-dressing. As in, I need to stay approachable and relatable in order to do my job well. Working with other programmers, especially those who are much younger than myself, requires a high degree of candor, trust, and, sometimes, commiserating against what they see as the “the suits” (management, marketing, owners, lawyers, etc.). If they start to see me as higher up than them, it impacts my ability to work effectively with them and resolve problems both in code and in relationships.
I am not their superior (and don’t want to be), so there is a practical upper limit to how “well” I can dress before it really does start to impact my relationship with them, and not in a good way. I cannot be seen as a “suit”.
But yes, your advice is generally understood (and well-intentioned!)… it’s just a bit nuanced in this situation
It absolutely is intentional I just want better-fitting shirts similar to the kind I already wear. I’d get & wear more of them if I could better understand the fitting techniques.
But that doesn’t mean I want to totally change who I am or try to completely upscale my wardrobe or pretend to be somebody else entirely, that’s all!
Hmmm… you know… something about this sounded sooo familiar to me. It took me a second to figure out why…
13 years ago (!), you and I actually had a similar convo, lol! From that really, really old thread:
Well, that thread actually really did help — a lot. I took a lot of that advice, but not all of it (still have never worn a “peacoat” and never will), and managed to find a balance that both improved the things I wanted to improve, and kept the parts of me I wanted to keep.
A decade and several relationships later, guess what, lol… I did eventually find the lady of my dreams (coming up on 5 years now), and now we’re two silly, ordinary, working-class people who dig ditches together on the weekends, though the yoga has largely given way to more mountain biking and hiking and such (hence the trailwork and ditches).
Point is… I want my clothes to represent who I am, not the other way around.
This… was fantastic, lol. I laughed so much at that clip. We ended up watching the whole movie that night (which neither of us had ever heard of, somehow). Thanks for the chuckle!
PS Ryan Gosling does look great in that suit. But he’d also look good in anything… or nothing at all.
Steve Carell, on the other hand… I much preferred the fun-dad version of him (the one who got cheated on) than the very strangely dolled-up, post-transformation version of him. Did people ever really dress like that, even in the 2010s? It looks absurd:
That was my experience too, when I went shopping there for a wedding shirt (for someone else’s wedding). They were able to measure me but there was only a tiny handful of shirts (like maybe 3 or 4) that would fit my size and needs, at least at my budget.
I remember, shopping with older adults when I was a teenager, it used to be aisles and aisles of the stuff. Now Macy’s is nearly dead (at least around here) and comfier, simpler clothes are the norm.
Anything with buttons is already relatively rare, both where I work and where I live (rural Oregon and California).
I mean, that’d be nice! Once I get some measurements, ideally I could just find clothes that fit them right off the rack. I can’t really afford to get them tailored.
Uniqlo is great, but they are a niche Japanese brand that’s not easy to find stateside. Notably, I cannot try any of them on locally and returns are a hassle. But the few shirts I have from them are quite wonderful.
It’d just be nice to have access to a broader selection of styles and brands. I’d like a “fit” (i.e., a set of measurements) that I can take with me and re-use across clothing retailers anywhere. Patagonia and REI, for example, contribute some part of sales to environmental efforts (which I appreciate), and both have the fun outdoorsy patterns and textiles that I prefer. But fitting their clothes is a very difficult for me, both online and in-store. And now I better understand why.
Or if I happen to run across a shirt when I go through Costco, it’d just be nice to have some objective way to measure it ahead of time (they have no fitting rooms) to know if it’d fit me. Standing in line to return the ill-fitting ones (which is well over 70% of them) is a tedious and annoying process. And also heartbreaking when I really loved the design
For the record, we really enjoyed that movie. It’s probably one of my favorites now, actually.
I loved Ryan Gosling & Emma Stone in La-La Land. Steve Carrel is one of my partner’s favorite actors. I don’t know how neither of us have ever heard of this movie!
Lol, truthfully, because it would!
There is a huge chasm between what I do (coding stuff) and, say, enterprise sales.
Put our salesman in front of the people I work with and they’d be like “dude, spare me the sales pitch and get me a developer”. Conversely, put me in front of another company’s executives and they’d be like who the hell are you, get me somebody who actually knows business. Different roles, different personalities, different clothes and all that.
I’m not a banker or a lawyer; I’m just some guy who codes for a living and gives guided nature tours in leaf-patterned shirts from time to time. What works great in those contexts will not work so well in others, that’s all. I would not last long in more formal settings — not that I’d ever want to join them, to begin with.
Emphasis on the casual part of business casual
Yeah, that’s a bit of unknown variable here. Hence me wanting to dress up a little more than usual… but still not too much.
The Brogrammer Dress Code™ knows no national borders Seriously, though, it’ll be fine. We’re all just excited to meet each other after years of working from home.
Thing is that once you know their house brand in that size and “cut” fits you well, you can confidently order more online in different colors and patterns without fear of having to return.
The tuxedo, or dinner jacket, was actually an example of dressing down. The formal frock coat with tails was the standard gentleman’s jacket in the early to mid Victorian period. Then that young fashion radical, Edward, Prince of Wales (ie later Edward VII) and his chums adopted a dinner jacket, without the tails. It was the long frock coat, shortened, and worn with a black tie, not the white tie that had evolved from the Regency-period neckcloths.
White tie and tails is considered the most formal type of men’s garb, for evening wear, but is very rare outside of state dinners.
In England, there’s also the morning coat, which is worn for day events; usually grey, not black, also with tails, and worn with grey pin-striped trousers. Watch Four Weddings and a Funeral for examples.
It used to be the tradition that the Solicitor-General worn a morning suit when arguing in the Supreme Court on behalf of the United States; don’t know if that’s still the case.
Well, don’t understate the effect of the guy in the “after” photo standing with better posture, smiling, etc.
Exactly. In my post above, I mentioned that a tuxedo is technically considered to be semi-formal, mainly because it omits the tails, as you point out.
It’s still worn by orchestra conductors and at certain debutante balls.
Never heard of them before this thread. But today in the US Open, Adam Scott is near the lead and wearing a shirt w/ a Uniqlo logo!
Hmm, I guess it depends on your location, I never thought of Uniqlo as a niche brand, they’ve had several huge stores in NYC for like 15 years. I have a bunch of stuff from them.
Me either - there are something like 50 stores in the US so it’s not going to be in every mall but I wouldn’t have thought of it as “niche”
Yeah, they do have a few stores in urban areas, but I don’t think they’re exactly well known here.
I’d never heard of them until someone gifted me one. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone else in one of their shirts either, but I guess it’s kinda hard to know since they don’t emblazon their logo on their clothes (another thing I like about them).
If they do actually offer a different fit and it’s not just my imagination, wouldn’t their stuff be too long for most people here?