AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE POWER SUIT

No shoes, no shirt, no consequence

This piece previously appeared on Medium.com.

“Thus fashion on one hand signifies union with those in the same class, the uniformity characterized by it, and, uno actu, the exclusion of all other groups.” 

— Georg Simmel, 1904

“Accreted power tramples over the will of the individual — because that is what power does.” 

— The Economist, Sept. 8, 2018

A cornered animal bristles its fur to appear larger.

To dress for power is to extend the body, like the retractable claws of a predator; to convince by size, silhouette and animus that you possess the authority either to reward those who please you, or cause swift and immediate pain to those who offend. 

Until the French Revolution in 1789, mens fashions were dictated by the the French court. Puffy sleeves, enormous wigs, high heeled booties, all to give an impression of largeness and virility.  The idea that the higher the appearance of a person’s head, “the closer (they are) to God,” has perennially applied both to Pope hats and Dolly Parton wigs. 

(Large hair may also be used to cultivate an aura of fear and menace. For an analog to the intentionally disturbing, shock-and-awe hairstyle persecuted by current President Trump, Barack Obama would have required a Don King fright-afro, which surely would have prevented his leadership. )

Elevator heels, holstered weapons and aggressive back-combing notwithstanding, the suit, since the beginning of the 20th centurey, has been the primary psychological exoskeleton by which the professional man - that evolved landshark in three-season, worsted super 150’s - may protect his image, declare his status, and potentially intimidate those in his purview into obedience and submission. 

It is impossible to describe the evolution of the modern suit without invoking the innovations of Beau Brummell, whoredefined the look of the Regency age.  

Apres le deluge, when the wigs came off with the heads, and the breeches were hung out to dry (along with the workers of the international Left), men’s fashion had guttered into a modified English riding costume - an ersatz country-drag silhouette, intended to suggest the equestrian leisure activities of the gentry (this look, like most enduring styles, began as an avant-garde rebellion; the young first wore their riding costumes into the drawing room to scandalize the old.) 

To Brummell’s jaundiced eye, the conventional costume of his day was unforgivably tainted by such court holdovers as over-tight breeches, ruffly lace sleeves, long bejeweled cutaway coats, garish waistcoats, or over-accessorizing with too many chains, braids and buckles.

Brummell’s innovations, e.g. daily bathing, custom-tailored stirrup trousers, and a veritable fetish for starch - made him an intimidating figure for anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path while wearing last year’s knee-breeches.  While most habits of the French court were passé, ridicule was still enormously potent; Brummell, a celebrated wit, delighted in bullyragging to the stumps anyone whose dress he perceived as befouled by foppery.  Many such anecdotes are still remembered and beloved today (source: RegencyHistory.net): 

Brummell asked a friend of his what he called those things on his feet. “Why shoes,” he replied. “Shoes, are they?” said Brummell doubtfully, and stooping to look at them, “I thought they were slippers.”

Brummell chucked all poetry, loucheness, individuality and frippery associated with the court in favor of more somber, subdued, and manly cuts and colors. The dandyism for which Brummell was famed was decidedly butch. The most famous of Brummel’s enduring quotes invariably betray his deep distaste for anything flashy, which he considered womanish:  

“To be truly elegant, one should not be noticed.”

(Poets lamented; Baudelaire was plunged into depression when he noticed himself in an abrubtly Brummellized society clad in black and grey, and declared the new fashion a symbol of mourning for a world in which even the potential for beauty had died.)

Indeed, the austerity of the business suit, according to fashion historian René König, had its roots firmly planted in personal and sexual repression:  “The man’s suit of today is a direct descendant of the puritan dress, a political demonstration against the ostentation of the (French) courts.”

Unobstructed by threats of socialism, the bourgeoisie professional class found itself devoid of natural enemies (save each other) and the subdued new style began to seen as symbolic participation in capitalism’s unstoppable rise.

The end of 19th century vigorously expelled the private self from the workplace. Public presentation became decidedly conformist; a man in long trousers and a top-hat was intentionally declaring that industry had slain his libido, and/or bought all its future rights. The look was intended to suggest restraint, mastery over all temporal urges, “goal-orientedness,” punctuality, and accuracy.  The modern gentleman sought to present himself as unflinchingly ready to exploit others with even more ruthlessness and ingenuity than the aristocratic serfdoms he presumed to replace.

With industrialization came migration into major cities. Workers seeking their fortunes had opportunities for reinvention. 

Status-seeking meant wearing the properly coded garments.

Rationalism replaced feudal loyalty, and brought with it a need to split the self into at least two distinct parts: a performative social workplace persona, and a personal self that needed vigorous and constant repression. The necktie is symbolic of this emotional self-control - the strangling of feelings in order to belong to a professional social order of other goal-oriented, bourgeoise men who distrust their true selves enough to smother them.

(The necktie wouldn’t make its way into the American workplace until the 1940s, but its acknowledged origin is the ‘cravat’ perfected by Beau Brummell: a length of linen, painstakingly creased around the neck in a laborious way that was intended to look tossed-on and casual.)

Gentlemen of the Victorian era (1837-1901), now fully enslaved to the whims of the tailors of Saville Row, paired their form-fitting frock coats with trousers, which first appeared around 1800.  The frock-coat, sometimes with velvet trim on the collar - was the look of more money than you.  The Edwardian era (from the 1890’s until the 1914-ish, or the beginning of WWI) swapped out the frock coat for the morning coat, a la the patriarch in ‘Downton Abbey.’ 

Frock coats and trousers held manhood in thrall until overtaken in the 20th century by the three-piece suit.

Suits — that is, jackets and pants tailored from the same material— were originally known as “lounge suits,” and were first created made for sport activities like cycling or hunting. (Tweeds, among the first fabrics to be used for both pants and jacket, essentially began as the reviled tracksuit of today.)

In 1849, between the introduction of the first sewing machine in 1830 and its mass production in 1850, gold was discovered in the California hills. Four plucky Brothers with the seminal last name of Brooks introduced the world’s first off-the-rack suit to cater to the new money of prospectors — an atavistic bunch of excitable Yosemite Sams who didn’t have enough patience to suffer dentistry, let alone be groped during multiple fittings by soft-fingered tailors. Due to its shorter, dartless, wholly un-formfittting jacket, it would come to be known as the “sack suit” or “box suit.” 

By 1870, the box-suit was entrenched in North America. 

It stayed, and stayed, and stayed. All innovations in conservative men’s businesswear came to a screeching halt some 170 years ago. The box suit remains virtually unchanged to this very day; Brooks Brothers still sells the No. 1 Box Suit in the same cut as it was at the turn of the twentieth century.  

It remains the least symbolic and most inoffensive mens’ fashion ever created.  Since its inception as a fashion statement, it’s as good as saying nothing at all, and merely handing over your tax records. 

Nearly all Presidents of the United States have worn Brooks Brothers box suits since 1918.  Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in a Brooks Brother’s suit; it is widely speculated that John F. Kennedy was also (coroners did not release the label of Kennedy’s last suit, it is also speculated that this was possibly at the request of Brooks Brothers.) 

There were a few notable fluctuations in the suit in the twentieth century, when the fashion industry was still consolidated enough to promote enormous changes in fashion that were visibly identifiable by decade — but none of them really affected what was worn in conservative or executive circles. 

There was the 1920s, with the wide-Oxford trouser leg - Brideshead Revisted, boola boola. Fitzgerald foppery, thanks to the Ivy Leagues.  The prohibition era gave us fashion superstars like Al Capone and Legs Diamond, who gave not one fuck in double-breasted pinstripes and raccoon coats. 

Wars invariably had their effect on menswear. Too much may be said about WWII and Nazi tailoring, particularly since many of Germany’s more memorable looks, such as those of the SS, were created by future business-suit mogul Hugo Boss.  

Using wartime rationing as an excuse, tailors began insinuating military cuts into the business suit — making the double-breast passé, narrowing lapels, and getting rid of the vest in the name of austerity - but this was as much or more about changing the silhouette to force the purchase of new suits than anything else. 

The grey flannel suit popularized in 1950’s was, at first, associated with wage-slave middle-class conformist schmuckery — lowly commuters on trains to planned suburbs — until the Prince of Wales sported a pair.  Then it became iconic. 

The Rat Pack and Cult of Sinatra brought Italian menswear back into vogue -  skinny cut suits and skinny ties, cut in shiny  sharkskin - just in time to outfit a new species of apex predator executives: the Mad Men of Madison Avenue, who struck gold in the new uncharted boomtown of the American mind by perverting Freudian psychology to manipulate consumers. 

In the sixties, while the anti-establishment movement enjoyed bold new artificial colors and a return to long-haired gender-bending, the conservative establishment remained stalwart in Brooks Brothers box suits. 

The 1970s, though largely regarded as the hangover and aftermath of the 1960’s, saw a brief return to an almost courtly level of individualism and blatantly objectified male sexuality in men’s suits that would have cheered Baudelaire up immensely, due to the unexpected charismatic dominance of John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.”  The condom-tight white suit and platform heels were later risibly worn by Pacino’s Scarface in the 80’s (which, instead of relegating the three-piece white suit and black shirt to a Halloween costume, instead secured it as a classic in the aspiring narcocapitalist wardrobe.)

The men’s fashion backlash against the 1970s in the 1980s is somewhat comparable to Beau Brummell’s loathing of the French court in terms of its visceral disgust.  Fashionwise, the eighties treated the seventies like a blackout-night that resulted in a persistent STD.

The “power suit” earned its named and reached its apotheosis in the 1980s, with the popularization of Giorgio Armani, whose generously cut, shoulder-padded gangster-suits came to represent the predatory, laissez-faire capitalism for which Wall Street remains infamous.  With their superior wools, notched collars, double-breasting, chalk-stripes and inward-turned pleats, the only missing signifier of prohibition-era gangsterdom was a Tommy gun. 

While the most famous movie portrayal of the financial world’s ethical zombism in the 1980’s was the Michael Douglas role of Gordon Gecko in “Wall Street,” Christian Bale’s portrayal of psychopath Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho” is more edifying about the importance of subtlety in suit dominance, in the executive class. 

Luis: “That’s a wonderful suit….don’t tell me, don’t tell me, let me guess….Valentino Couture?”

Patrick (distantly): Mmm-hmm. 

Luis:  (fondling suit)

“it looks so soft.” 

Patrick slaps his hand away. 

“Your compliment was sufficient, Luis.”

After the stock market crash in the 1980s, when Wall Street was rebuilding itself on penny stocks and tape-painting. The film “Wolf of Wall Street” shows tailors on the selling floor measuring men’s arms and laying muslin on their pinstripes while the brokers bellow obscenities into telephones. 

“Every day, money-crazed kids beat a path to my door,” says Jordan Belfort. “If we hired’em, they’d drop straight out of college overnight and spend whatever allowance they had on a new suit from our Stratton tailor.” 

In terms of motion, the 1990’s were fashion doldrums, notable only for grunge, minimalism, and suit jackets occasionally being  layered with hoodies, due to editorial stylists for men’s magazines getting excited over sartorial mashups. 

Today’s power suit exudes either the presence of money or the ability to steal it.  Its primary driving force and ethos is utilitarianism. 

It remains the primary staple of a political wardrobe because of its psychological invisibility.  A Brooks Brother’s suit symbolizes absolutely nothing, particularly when worn with no ornamentation save a wedding band and a cloisonné flag lapel pin.

The power suit — like a ski mask, or a necklace of human ears -  is an instrument of the political economy that surrounds it in time.  It tells us that while technology and social climates have changed, power has remained exactly the same. The box suit reassures us that Capitalism is as unlikely to evolve past criminal collusion and exploitation as the Brooks Brothers No. 1 Box Suit is to suddenly grow tails. 

“I’m sorry,” says Patrick Bateman, the American Psycho, to a black homeless man in an alley, with whom he has been attempting to relate.  “I just don’t have anything in common with you,” Bateman tells the man just before stabbing him to death. 

At the end of American Psycho (spoiler alert) Bateman, in an existential crisis, goes to great lengths to have his killing spree stopped.  He commits ever-more outrageous atrocities,  confessing them openly to everyone he encounters. Nobody believes him.  Everyone in his immediate society is too impressed by his presentation, or narcissistic, self-absorbed and invested in the collective myth of their elitism to notice, hear his words or care.  The Valentino Couture suit is the perfect dazzle camouflage, turning even the blood of multiple hookers virtually invisible. 

So instead of being arrested or executed, the poor American Psycho in his beautifully soft bespoke power suit just miserably…persists. 

CintraW@gmail.com

Artwork: “Easter,” oil on canvas 2019 by Cintra Wilson