NEW YORK, United States — Reporting here
from the
Hot Tub Time Machine, dial set to 2010. Business analysts and those
with even a passing interest in menswear will remember that as the year when
Suitsupply became a worldwide phenomenon. It was also when, for the first time,
novel technology enabled men to customize suits online without having to submit
to pesky nuisances like tailors or the bother of going into a store.
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As it happens, 2010 also coincided with certain
other shifts in the evolution of fashion, and this may be the place to note a
fact about menswear that is generally too little appreciated. As a masculine
uniform, the suit has changed remarkably little in 400 years, historians of
costume say. (Regarding which:
Harry Styles in a dress would have been no big
whoop to inhabitants of preindustrial eras, when men and women alike wore
tunics and aristocratic boy children were attired in frocks until graduating to
two-legged garments in a rite of passage known as “breeching”.)
In other words, while suits have always been with
us, their proportions shift constantly along with tastes, and by the second
decade of this century, the influence of American designer Thom Browne had
crept into every corner of an industry floundering for direction. For anyone
unaware of Browne’s influence, we will put it this way: Honey, he shrunk the
suit.
Browne made jackets snugger and shorter,
billboarding the male posterior. He designed skinny trousers so short that men
suddenly had ankles again.
Mainstream
fashion may have sidestepped the more extreme manifestations of the shrunken
suit, and yet it got the memo. Guys of all kinds and varied anatomical types —
from “giraffes” to “short kings” — embraced tight suits, made them a business
wear default and stuck with them. Then, of course, the pandemic happened, and
no one needs to read another story about what that did to hard pants and
blazers.
Now, of course, a great many workers are back in the
office. A surprising number have already been toiling in corporate ant farms
for months or even, in the case of some investment banks, as much as a year.
In terms of return-to-office dressing, then, it is
finance bros who are leading the way. And for anyone looking to observe these
people in their natural habitat, the ideal viewing platform is the atrium at
Brookfield Place, a vast office-mall complex in
Manhattan’s financial district.
There, this menswear critic parked himself on three lunch hour afternoons last
week to grab a snapshot of what men in business are wearing to the office. If
the intel gathered was in some sense random, it was also in every case
surprising.
Far from dressing much differently than they had
before COVID-19 sent workers scattering to the security of bedroom workspaces,
finance bros, as it turns out, were dressed much as people holding those same
jobs might have been when
Barack Obama occupied the White House. Unlike the
former president, whose sartorial tastes were often slightly passé, the men
riding the escalators down from the Royal Bank of Canada, financial services
companies like American Express, or the Jones Day law firm, or picking up Le
District jambon baguette sandwiches to brown-bag it at nearby financial
behemoths like Goldman Sachs, looked right up to date. That is, if the date in
question were 2010.
“What am I wearing?” said David, a 30-year-old
Goldman employee who, like many interviewed for this story, cited company
policy in declining to provide his full name. “Who wants to know?”
It turns out that David’s manner of dress could
serve as a template for every finance bro in the official, we-really-mean-it
phase of the return to the office. (David Solomon, the CEO of
Goldman Sachs,
has been a staunch opponent of the trend toward hybrid work, repeatedly stating
that he views remote work as an aberration and expects employees to return to
the office full time.)
Like almost every person interviewed, or even
spotted, at Brookfield Place, David had on a crisp white shirt with an open
spread collar. His happened to be a $99 Leeward dress shirt from Mizzen+Main.
It fit his muscular torso snugly. And so, too, did his $148 slim-fit, navy
side-pocket polyester and “elastomultiester” New Venture stretch pants from the
Lululemon business casual line. His lace-up Oxfords came from Bruno Magli, he
said. They were black.
It is true that some people sported shorts and
flip-flops at the office during the tumbleweed times, when intrepid employees
insisted on working at corporate headquarters so vacant they were like
supersize WeWork cubicles. At banks like Goldman Sachs and
JPMorgan Chase,
insiders say, top-level executives continue to hang on to certain pandemic
customs as signifiers of elevated status. “Unlined cashmere blazers, dark
jeans, and Allbirds are symbolic vectors of seniority,” an investment banker at
a blue-chip firm said last week.
In a stretch, “you could wear jeans on a Friday”,
said Arjun Menon, 33, a Goldman Sachs employee. Menon quickly added that he was
not permitted to talk to the press, although not before disclosing that the
navy side-pocket trousers he was wearing with a crisp, white open-collar shirt
and a pair of lace-up Oxfords — the Michael Bublé ballad of footwear — were
purchased at Suitsupply.
Based on the available evidence, Suitsupply,
Lululemon, Club Monaco, and Brooks Brothers (although not the revitalized,
trend-conscious iteration of the venerable clothier’s offerings produced under
the creative direction of Michael Bastian) remain the go-to labels for a lot of
white-collar workers. This is particularly true of bankers in the bullpens,
guys newly out of MBA programs, still making a mark and not yet so jaded that
they secretly yearn to burn their corporate logo fleeces.
For Ryan Meiser, 31, an investment analyst at Royal
Bank of Canada, the return-to-office phase signaled little real change in his
morning routine. “You do want to have your own mind about dressing,” said
Meiser, who wore a white Giorgio Armani shirt, a pair of gray Zegna trousers,
and shoes by a maker whose name he had forgotten.
But in the end, what one chooses to wear to the
office may be a less relevant question than where exactly that place may be.
“Three days a week in the office is mandatory, with Monday and Friday
optional,” Meiser said.
“Weekends,” he added with a laugh, “we’re free to work from
home.”
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