Can I wear a suit with no tie and just leave the top button unbuttoned? Is this kosher or unheard of?
This is best done with a sport coat; not a suit. It’s ok if you’re going somewhere after work and remove the tie, but you really don’t want to leave the house tie-less in a suit. Also, no casual shoes, please.
It can certainly be done with a suit. However, this look works best with a more stylish suit for club, dinner or evening wear. This look doesn’t work as well with a conservative business suit.
If there is no tie, greater care needs to be given to the shirt. Now would be the time to break out the patterns and colors. I’d shy away from white, unless that looks great with that particular suit. You want the look to be stylish and very deliberate, not like you are slumming without a tie.
Doing this with a sport coat or blazer is also a nice choice.
Also, you might want to stick a tie or two in your office, just in case. The look works, but sometimes during the day you might want to throw the tie on for a meeting.
Also, I suggest being well groomed for this. If you are unshaven, scruffy-haired and the dirt under your nails could grow weeds you will just look unkempt and messy.
-Tcat
I wear a suit every day to work, and only put a tie on when I have to. It is certainly not the norm in my line of work (or really even my office) to eschew the tie even when performing dronelike work at one’s desk, but I do it anyway. Screw em.
But always, always have an extra tie handy. I bring one with me when I leave the house in the morning, and have one or two at my desk just in case I forget.
You can wear a suit with no tie and a turtleneck, and pretend it’s the 70’s.
Wearing a smart-looking turtleneck instead of a shirt looks pretty good too, IMO.
I now work in San Francisco. The style seems to be- good suit, blue shirt, no tie. Ties are mostly worn by dudes with grey hair or security guards. Just my observations.
Two words: hair shirt.
So the tie has gone from a status symbol to a low-status symbol. “I am obsolete” or “I am underclass.” (Assuming a dude with prematurely grey hair wouldn’t wear a tie, either.)
Reminds me of PJ O’Rourke’s early-'80s observation about LA: suits were for pool cleaners, tuxedos for burials.
This makes me think, more trendily cut suit with more fitted, stylish shirt, rather than the traditional business suit and Oxford shirt.
I’m not sure suit and tie with no shirt has been given its due. 
You might be mistaken for Saddam Hussein.
::d&r::
Or the fun new Holocaust-denying President of Iran – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Apparently this is becoming quite the fashion for the insane Middle Eastern demagogue on the go.
Insane Middle Eastern demagogue? Where do I send my resume?
Not a suit-wearer, but when I see a guy in that get-up it just looks wrong. There is too much of the shirt showing, and as a consequence the chest looks too broad. I also think of it as something that swarthy 70s-looking guys do, although in that case the first couple of buttons would be undone and there would be a faux gold pendant on their chest. If I saw a guy do this in real life, I’d probably think he’d spilled coffee on his tie or got it caught in the paper shredder.
The first two things I thought of were the Wild and Crazy Guys from SNL and Adrian Monk. Not fictional characters whose fashion sense I’d be emulating.
To me, the suit-with-no-tie look reminds me of one person: 60-year-old Vince McMahon, the barrel-chested, steroid-pumped, plastic-haired, nearly-senile, Machiavellian madman owner of the WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment.
Low status? I wear a suit and tie everyday. It’s standard attire in senior mgmt, at least in the large corporations I deal with.
What’s with the hooded sweatshirt and sport coat look I’m seeing lately? I first noticed it Dogma, but as only the angels and the metatron did it, I kinda figured it was a metaphor for wings or something.
Lately, though, I see it a fair amount. Both on TV and in person. What gives?
Quod erat demonstrandum.