Wall Street/Boiler Room: "Get a decent suit" = bullshit?!

Cafe Society
1

Both in Wall Street and Boiler Room there is a meme expressed of “your suit sucks, get a decent suit.” I call bullshit on this.

Point the first. I am into clothing (metrosexual) and can tell the difference, but I don’t think most men are really into judging other men’s clothing. Rich, powerful men don’t necessarily wear “good,” stylish suits, either. The upshot is that, I suspect, most Wall Street types are not really into judging other men by their clothes.

Point the second. Your basic off-the-rack suit from JC Penny (Stafford) looks OK. Although it may not look like a top-of-the-line model from Joseph A. Bank, there is really nothing shameful about it. The only way a suit can look really bad is if it doesn’t fit at all or really super cheap or it’s worn to shit.

Point the third. I haven’t worked as a stock broker but I have worked at rich companies in the world of business in the US and Japan and my observation is that execs are in general not concerned with dress and are really quite careless and sloppy.

Further, in the movie BR they really don’t interract with their clients in person and just talk on the phone. My guess is that IRL these guys would not care at all about their dress. Nia Long is hot, though, don’t you think?

So I cry “false meme” and will let those more in the know about Wall Street correct me. TY!

2

The whole point of both Wall Street and Boiler Room is that the people are all organized crooks – far more obsessed with their own egos and self-image than actually being competent financial professionals.

Real Wall Street people are balding nerds who wear ill-fitting suits decades out of style while they pore over financial data in their tiny, hot cubicles.

3

Plus it’s a not-so-subtle way to put down a possible rival, hurt his self-confidence and maybe knock him off-balance. And if you’re working the phones in a boiler room, what customer/client/mark/sucker is ever gonna see your suit anyway?

4

Right on, EH.

5

“Rich and Powerful” does not mean the same thing as “Wall Street types”. Wall Street basically means finance professionals - investment bankers, hedge funds, stockbrokers, etc. Bill Gates is rich and powerful but he dresses like a slob. Because of bonuses, many young Wall Street types are rich. It’s one of the few professions where you can actually become a millionare within a few years. But because of their lack of seniority, they aren’t all that powerful.

Kind of off topic but “Wall Street” as a geographical location isn’t really the center of finance anymore. Most of the major investment banks - Lehman, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, etc are up in Midtown now. Mostly it’s just the exchanges down there now.

The “power look” usually consists of a dark, well taylored conservative suit. Usually with cufflinks and monogrammed shirts. The big joke in Boiler Room was that the “stylish” suits the J.T. Marlin guys wear make them look like gaudy B&T guidos, not powerful financial professionals.

Wall Street types sometimes do get into pissing contests over cars, suits, summer homes and other status symbols. Especially when their bonuses are high. As a general rule, however, they don’t need to wear suits every day if they aren’t meeting clients. Most of the time, especially for the analysts and associates, they just wear dress pants and a button down shirt.

I don’t think Jos A. Banks is a particularly high-end suit. Mid range to high end suits usually come from Brooks Brothers, Hugo Boss, Armani, Charles Thywitt and places like that and cst around $400 - $1000. There are even higher end suits that I’m not even aware of.

Many stockbrokers do dress like slobs. When I interviewed at UBS out of college, they had traders making $200,000 a year working the trading floor in T-shirts and jeans.

It’s really more in client-facing front office jobs and more at the senior levels that you find people wearing powersuits to work every day.

6

My work takes me to several different law firms every week, and I can tell you that most attorneys wear a button-down shirt and khakis to the office unless they’re going to meet with clients, and only then do they opt for suits and ties. As usual, conservative gray or navy suits are the most common, with white or blue shirts and relatively plain red or striped ties. But if they can get away with it, attorneys greatly prefer to show up to work in polo-type shirts tucked into khakis or even nice jeans. I’ve never noticed any kind of suit snobbery going on among attorneys, except for a few I have encountered online.

7

Where do Hickey Freeman and Oscar de la Renta suits rank?

While ego and self-image certainly play into the meme from Wall Street and Boiler Room, there is an element of good advice in it. Basically, it’s the cliché’ about you only have one chance to make a good first impression and in the business and professional world, that means you should wear a decent suit if you’re going to be meeting a new client. Granted, judging the competence of a broker by his or her suit is rather superficial but I’ve seen it happen. I used to be an in-house counsel for a small company that hired a business broker to find someone who wanted to buy the corporation. Needless to say, as often happened with this company, relations soured and the broker was unceremoniously let go. Afterward, the company president told me that the fact the broker wore an ill-fitting suit should’ve tipped him off about the quality of the services he was getting.

8

Dead on. If it’s “off the rack” it’s not a high end suit. Go to a city with a stock exchange or a political capitol (e.g. Chicago, NYC, D.C.) and you’ll find tailors. Head to London and there’s a whole street full of them: Savile Row. Drop a few grand and you’ve got yourself a high end suit.

A traveling tailor will make a custom-fitted suit for $3,000 or more; you have to schedule a fitting when he is in your city (this is how someone in Huntsville gets a custom suit). A tailor who can afford to keep an established location can and probably will charge more, but is likely to give discounts to customers who buy several suits in a year. An example might be George de Paris in Washington DC (tailor to every President for the last 40 years).

9

He’s not “dead on” (according to your logic) because he was saying other off-the-rack suits are “high end.” An Armani, despite its price, is an off-the-rack suit. To answer his point, Jos. A. Bank has very expensive stuff; it is comparable to Brooks Bros. in the price range it offers (i.e., rather cheap to extremely high).

I’m not sure you’re on target here about cost. You can get fully tailored suits in Indianapolis from $1,200 on up. In any case, I don’t think anyone would consider $3,000 the rock-bottom bare minimum for a “decent suit.”

Another alternative is made-to-measure. I have used Tom James, and they are good. If it’s good cloth and it fits you, I don’t think anyone can say it’s not “decent.”

10

My experience, which is limited to NYC firms, is quite the opposite. One more reason to leave Manhattan.

11

I’ve been told Hickey Freeman suits are pretty nice. Not sure about OdlR.

If you happen to be in Hong Kong or Singapore, you are supposed to be able to get quality custom tailored suits for dirt cheap (according to my collegues who’ve been there).

12

About two years ago I worked as a temp. First place I worked was Dolce and Gabbana, the second place I worked was a hedge fund. Now, at the hedge fund I got to see the trading floor on numerous occasions. My memory is a bit hazy on the exact details, but I seem to remember people wearing business casual a lot but probably wore suits and took the jacket off most of the day. But i’m sure the guys meeting clients were most likely wearing normal suits. I never saw anything too flashy, and the IT guys where I worked never wore suits.

But in my opinion, judging someone based on their suit is a knife that cuts both ways. Banking and investing has a reputation of being based on confidence. Why did banks build such massive structures? To give the impression to their clients that their money was safe. Same goes for the people handling the money. A nice respectable suit is a good thing to see when someone is going to be handling a lot of your money. It’s a bit of a hoop to go through. Just because a guy doesn’t care for the way society works with regards to business dress, doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be bad with your money. But on the other hand you have to wonder, “he knows that this is the social norm, why does he refuse to follow it?”

As far as needing a flashy suit? I think you have to try really hard to do badly. But I generally believe that if you take care of how you look, people will have a better impression of you as long as your work is of the same caliber. Take a guy who looks stylish and on the ball, vs someone who isn’t, then who are you going to choose all other things being equal. Wearing an old, ill-fitting suit seems to be a sign that you have given up to some degree. Dedication is a big deal to a lot of people.

But if you want to get into frivolous details, it’s most likely not true. I’m sure there could be or still is some cadre of folks running around living their lives like in Wall Street, but who can know for sure. But at the hedge fund where I worked, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of that going on. Nobody was too sharp, or too bad, just average. So, IME, it’s BS.

13

I’ve been told the same thing.

Also, to address a pet-peeve of mine: “button-down” shirts refer to dress shirts with button-down collars, not all dress shirts. It’s actually not clear from context what the posters using that term meant, but I always feel the need to clear that up when I hear it potentially used incorrectly :slight_smile:

14

On that note, what is considered “cooler,” more stylish, or on the other hand, more conservative: button-down collars or straight collars? I have some of both kinds of dress shirts, and admit I prefer the straight-collared variety myself.

Of course, as a librarian, I never button my top shirt button and always leave my tie a little loose, and I’m still dressed sharper than most of my male peers.

15

I think there is a definitive answer to this: it’s considered basically uncool to wear a button-down collar shirt with a “nice” suit; i.e., it’s not a formal look.

Wikipedia:

Wikipedia notes here the “button-down = all dress shirts” error, and I have heard it too.

16

Right. My experience is that truly rich/powerful dudes just dress how they want to and are if anything proud of the fact that they have transcended through their wealth/power society’s expectations of how they should look. This has its limits, though; they usually do not go crazy.

17

As someone who is in senior management on the leadership team of my company, I have to tell you all: you have it all wrong.

When someone tells you “get a decent suit” - they are trying to tell you that you are not a top performer and/or one of the Team. Period. As you have all pointed out, if a top performer is a slob, is anyone really going to force them to change?

The real questions when someone tells you to get a decent suit:

  • Are they someone you should listen to? If they are a peer who is busting your balls that is very different from your boss or someone in an influential position.

  • Are they really talking about your suit, i.e., your appearance, or is that a way simply to tell you to pick up the pace, or to somehow play along with the Big Boys more so you are seen as a team player?

Having a decent suit CAN matter, but only within the context of your customer-facing activities and your relationship with the big players in your company…

My $.02

18

Well, yes, if they need a decent suit. Who on this planet tells someone “Get a decent suit” if what they mean is “You’re bad at your job?” What kind of weird code is that?

I’ve seen a shocking number of grown men who didn’t know how to dress for business, and they make a bad impression, but some bosses don’t have the nads to say anything.

It’s not hard to dress well, and it’s not expensive - you can find a perfectly decent suit off the rack if you go to the trouble of finding one that fits you right, wear a good pair of shoes, and buy some shirts and ties that look decent. It’s all about fit and matching patterns and colours. My off-the-rack suits might be detected as cheap by someone who works at GQ or really knows their suits, but to 99.9% of the population I can look fantastic for a pretty reasonable cost.

19

A pretty common code - you’ve never gotten peer pressue to behave or look a certain way?

I never said it meant “you’re bad at your job” I said it might mean “you’re not one of us” - and one certainly doesn’t have to care about that person’s opinion. While it may be grounded in truth - who doesn’t worry about their appearance? - it is usually loaded with additional meaning…

20

I suspect that many of the people posting in this thread are too young to remember when people wore business suits to the office, every day, to work at any professional job. During that era, yes, the quality of a man’s (or less often, a woman’s) suit often correlated with his/her rank in the company, and people paid a lot more attention to clothing than they do today.

Hell, even I could tell the difference between a cheap, threadbare wool/poly blend from J.C Penney and a luxurious mid-weight wool from Joseph A. Banks or Brooks Brothers. I probably couldn’t today, because I never see men’s suits any more.

Young people were often advised (in print, if not in person) to upgrade their wardrobes. In the hyper-competitive, image-conscious world of Wall Street in the 1980’s, the only reason such advice might ring false is that any young person would already know it.