What you’re not getting is what you think of as “nice outfit” doesn’t really match what a lot of other people think of as a “nice outfit”.
And discerning confidence level based of dress doesn’t work like you think it does. Confident people are confident no matter what they wear. Good looking people are good looking no matte what they wear. It doesn’t take anything special to wear a suit–it means that person likes to wear a suit. Just like it doesn’t mean anything when someone wears a tee and sweats, other than that’s what they wanted to put on.
The strange thing is, you apparently would prefer to look like you stepped out of a GQ magazine and I’d rather roll around in old fish than look “GQ.” The SDMB is a great way to discover there are all kinds of people in the world. Before arriving here, I literally had no idea so many men urinated sitting down, or that some men honestly enjoyed dancing. Everyone is not like me, even in ways I never imagined. I think the same thing is happening to you in this thread. Relax and enjoy the ride.
So if you see a beautiful woman from across the room and you were single, who do you think she would more than likely respect more? The guy in the suit, or the guy in the pair of jeans and gym shoes? Especially if she is out at a five star restaurant with a cocktail dress on?’
See this is the problem. Your values are not on the same level as I and the thousands of others who share my point of view. Not saying you are a bad person cause you are not. Just saying there are certain things that you must do to attract the attention of certain people in life and one of those things is dressing better than everyone else.
To give the cliched and expected answer, if she’s that shallow I don’t want to meet her.
But more seriously, despite my looking like a slob (by your definition), I’ve never had any problems in that department. Maybe you’re hanging out at the wrong bars.
You haven’t yet demonstrated that your point-of-view is the majority view, or even a common view.
Frankly, if I see a beautiful woman from across the room she is probably drinking a beer at a punk show. Sure, she’d probably be into a rude boy in a nice suit, but she’s just as likely to respect my jeans and boots. Lucky for me, eh?
Let me guess, you also dazzle your co-workers by your frequent use of words like “win-win,” “paradigm,” and “dynamic,” and when you interviewed for your current job you told the interviewer that your greatest weakness is that you work too hard.
Up until World War II, the vast majority of the population did hard physical labor. They spend most of their week wearing khakis or dungarees. For social occasions, they dressed up. The suit and tie was a welcome escape from the weekday routine.
In the 1950s and 1960s, many people moved up to the middle class, into white-collar jobs, where the suit and tie were part of the weekday routine. So casual clothes became the escape from workday drudgery.
I seem to be the opposite of the OP.
I went to my grandmas funeral a couple of months ago.
Most of the older men wore suits, none of the grand kids did. I haven’t owned a suit in decades so wore nice jeans and a button down and decent shoes, no one seemed to mind. My 70 something uncle wore jeans and a pink tee advertising his business.
OP, do you wear a bowler hat to baseball games?
It was the style back in the day.
I don’t even own a suit, you can call home and ask my wife.
Yes, this is true. I would NOT feel more confident wearing a suit, I’d feel as nervous as if I was dressed in a Roman toga. There are times where it would be appropriate to wear a Roman toga, and when those times come up I will wear a Roman toga no matter how uncomfortable I am wearing it. But for sitting at my desk working?
I work in technology in Seattle. If you wore slacks and a buttoned shirt every day to work people would think you like to dress up, but that would be your style. If you wore a suit and tie to work every day people would think you were crazy. There are client-facing parts of the industry where people dress according to the expectations of the clients, so if you are in the legal department you wear a suit and tie. But if you’re sweating in the server room you could wear a t-shirt and jeans, or shorts and sandals, or dockers and a buttoned up shirt according to your taste.
People don’t wear suits because they’d stand out as the weird one. If you’re wearing a suit and tie because you’ve got your eye on a different job, a job where wearing a suit and tie is the uniform, then why don’t you get that job? You wearing a suit means you don’t fit in, and don’t want to fit in. That’s fine, but what are you doing here?
I love these threads on the SDMB. Other entertaining ones:
1 - Why do you like tattoos (as in you shouldn’t)
2 - Why do you like parties (as in your shouldn’t)
3 - Why so you like sports (as in you shouldn’t)
4 - table manners
5 - car you drive
6 - etc.
I just don’t understand how anyone can like the color blue. It makes no sense. Red is so much more colorful, it has heart and warmth, blue is like a frozen landscape buried in the depths of time after nuclear holocaust.
My wife wants me to get a utilikilt. She says I have the legs for it. But I am not willing to spend $200 on a joke that I know I will not wear. On the other hand I let her buy me a fair number of suits for a lot more than that. Which I only wear to funerals and fancy dinners.
we finally figured out that dressing expensively doesn’t say anything about how competent or how good a person the wearer is. For example:
to me, that says you are either extremely arrogant or extremely insecure.
You are not your clothes. I’m sure the people behind Enron, Adelphia, MCI Worldcom, and Cerberus all dressed very smartly too.
So basically, you live to be a peacock. I doubt you’re impressing anyone, least of all me.
here’s why- formal wear (either business or black-tie) requires well-fitted clothing. Which for most of us means “tailored.” I’m proportioned such that I’ve found it damn near impossible to get a dress shirt off-the-shelf which simultaneously fits my neck, shoulders, chest, and waist. So now I’d have to pay a tailor to fit shirts to me.
and the final reason? It’s not expected in my profession. I’m an engineer, anything better than jeans & a tee is de rigueur. If I showed up in a suit and tie, nobody would say “well, there’s a go-getter who is moving up fast!” They’d wonder “why is he wearing a suit? Must have an interview.”
I hate dressing up largely because I’ve always felt neckties are stupid and pointless unless you use them as napkins. If the trend is toward more casual wear and this causes the tie to go the way of the dodo, I’m all for it.
