I don't mind the impending death of the suit, but I hope it doesn't get too weird to wear blazers and sport coats in informal settings, in my lifetime. They're so very nice. Wish I'd started wearing them years ago. Like a hoodie, but looks way better and has a ton more pockets. I'd hate to see that go the way of nice-looking hats (you can't wear those anymore unless you're 80 years old or want to look like a douchebag—your only option if you're not in one of those categories is bad-looking hats, which is unfortunate)
That and loafers. I'd been slipping on my (tied) sneakers for years, while all that time I could have had a shoe designed for that and that looks way nicer and lasts far longer! In America, you can dress those all the way up to business formal and down to going-to-the-grocery-store! So versatile. What a fool I was.
Incidentally, we in (at least certain segments of) this industry definitely have a look. I've got a pretty good record of spotting tech workers in non-tech-heavy areas and settings based solely on clothes & affect taken in from a distance, and I don't just mean when one's wearing legible clothing with some tech slogans or logos on them.
As a tech person who doesn’t fit “the look,” I hate that it’s become such a cultural signal. It’s rarely fun watching people react with surprise (doubt) when you tell them your occupation (if they give you the opportunity to chime in at all). :(
My fellow nerds, I would appreciate some more wardrobe diversity.
I like to wear lots of colors, funky jewelry and patterns, bright pink lipstick. Friends have compared the look to Ms. Frizzle (the original). Combined with a generally chipper personality, it’s often not well-received by fellow engineers. I usually get along great with the business and PMO though haha
I'd argue for most people <30 even wearing a button up shirt is a little 'weird' in an informal setting, so from my perspective blazers/sports coats in informal settings are already 'too weird'.
The further we get away from medieval shit like buttons and ties, the better. It's absurd to have ritual attire in an enlightened society, imo, and for it to be so anachronistic (and gendered) adds to the absurdity. Congresswomen get to wear these colorful and streamlined Star Trek getups, but all the men have to be in suits and ties. Nice.
I think it's important to leave room for beauty and aesthetics in men's dress, but that doesn't necessarily need to mean a suit and tie. Only very recently in history - say since around 1980 - has society decided that men's dress must be purely comfort-oriented and functional, with little or no thought given to shape, ornament, or aesthetic beauty.
I think that's a big loss, because beauty is an important part of the human spirit, and clothing is something we all have to wear every day, even if only for protection from the elements. A world where clothes are purely functional is a world where we're all dressed like Roman peasants.
Beauty in men's dress has always been a part of culture until very recently. Sure, not everyone could afford to dress beautifully, but the aspiration for men was there. We seem to have lost that aspiration of late, and I think that's kinda sad. I would call the state of men's dress aspirations today a lot of things, but "aesthetically compelling" is not one of them.
I think the button down should escape your ire - not gendered, the choice in which buttons to button can completely change the tone, more styling options expressed through sleeves and degree of tucking of the shirt.
I do find your statement
>Congresswomen get to wear these colorful and streamlined Star Trek getups, but all the men have to be in suits and ties
incredibly compelling however, your critique of the suit and the expected range of formal mens wear has struck a chord with me.
The more general shoe for that is the "camp moccasin", or "camp moc". Similar, but tends to have a tad less secure fit, and the sole's usually a little lighter (not specially designed to grip well on a wet wooden deck like a boat shoe—the name "boat shoe" isn't arbitrary). They're also a little sleeker-looking—typically one lace-hole rather than two as most boat shoes have, and I don't know my shoe-part terminology very well, but they usually lack the extra flaps over the top piece of leather where boat shoes put their lace holes, instead putting theirs directly in the main, top part of leather on the shoe. That also serves to make them a little lighter, in addition to the sole.
I'd recommend that style to someone who's only getting one of the two types. Some folks also notice the difference and will regard wearing boat shoes away from water, and especially wearing them with socks, as gauche, while camp mocs may "properly" be worn in almost any causal setting, with or without socks. Which, on the one hand, who gives a shit, but on the other, if you don't want the shoes for nautical purposes, no harm in getting the style that's a bit lighter & simpler-looking and won't draw ill judgement from anyone, socks or no socks, ocean-breeze or mountain cabin.
Agree with you that there's a nice medium level of "nice clothes" that look more formal and are more generally comfortable (though things like "jeans, but made from synthetics so they stretch and move more lightly" and such are making inroads in the comfort department).
> Incidentally, we in (at least certain segments of) this industry definitely have a look. I've got a pretty good record of spotting tech workers in non-tech-heavy areas and settings based solely on clothes & affect taken in from a distance, and I don't just mean when one's wearing legible clothing with some tech slogans or logos on them.
IMO, for men, there's a handful of main looks, and they're all pretty different for each other. "Nerd", "scruffy hacker", "fitness bro" are the ones I see most frequently.
> IMO, for men, there's a handful of main looks, and they're all pretty different for each other. "Nerd", "scruffy hacker", "fitness bro" are the ones I see most frequently.
Oh, for sure, some are easy-mode, though. Conference T and cargo shorts with sandals (possibly including white socks). Rumpled, slouchy shirt and pants outfit parts of which surely date back to a goth phase, but softened by the rest of the ensemble (how do you tell the difference between that and rural-town convenience store clerk? Some combo of age, other grooming, and various details—more feel than science). That kind of thing.
Ivy-league/MIT 2-year-veteran FAANG is a look, but about half that's body language rather than clothes.
Totally agree! When I was still in an office I'd wear a sports jacket and nice leather shoes almost every day. Even if some of my colleagues wore sweat pants.
It’s already getting weird. If you’re not going to some kind of party and the weather doesn’t support a blazer or sport coat, there’s no reason to be wearing it. If you’re wearing a blazer to do groceries, you look weird. As weird as a guy wearing a suit doing groceries, or a guy wearing a fedora anywhere.
I'm suspecting you're projecting your own culture. In my part of Europe, I wouldn't have a second glance at somebody doing groceries in a blazer, and I probably wouldn't even have any conscious thought about a guy in a sport coat at a party.
a big issue for me in tech was wearing suits... went from banking to retail sector where in banking it was a must to wear suits daily... to retail where you'd dress for your day. Nothing beats the feeling of a well tailored suit on a beautiful day and the comfort of it.
Just because suits are going out of fashion, doesn't mean there isn't a dress code anymore. A programmer at a typical startup has a dress code that's just as strict as a suit and tie ever was - except that now it's unspoken.
In other words, try showing up to your job as a programmer at your typical west coast startup wearing a fine suit and tie, just because you like the look. (Like I do!) I think you'll quickly find that the de facto dress code is, in fact, old jeans plus graphic t-shirt/hoodie, or flat-front chinos plus gingham shirt, and that your coworkers are going to sneer at you for your choice to buck this unspoken dress code.
Wearing a suit and tie for pleasure to your basic programming job might even limit your career, because it might signal to your coworkers and bosses that you're not a team player. So much for no more dress codes!
Fashions don't deserve to last forever - suits and ties are inevitably fading away even as we might hand-wring about the continuing destruction of fine dress in American society. But to suggest that dress codes are disappearing is not correct. Dress codes are as alive as they ever were, now they're just unspoken.
Not west coast by an ocean, but in my experience there's no specific dress code as you try to cast it, instead there's a dismissal of suits in particular.
You can dress up in Goth fashion and play it Cyberpunk if you want, people will whole fully accept it. And it's also not unspoken at all, startup culture is straight pitched as disrupting traditional business, which makes suits a faux pas.
I'd compare it to wearing a Jonny Walker cosplay at a Anonymous Alcoholics meeting. It's not the dress code, it's what you're trying to convey.
> a typical startup has a dress code that's just as strict as a suit and tie ever was - except that now it's unspoken
Kind of like the idea of "leaderless" or "structureless" groups, in which the leadership hierarchy practically always ends up being obscured but no less real. Here's a really good old essay about this phenomenon in early feminism.
IMX the "Silicon Valley uniform" doesn't really have anything to do with being more casual or relaxed. It's just another kind of conformity, comforting for those who do like to conform and stressful for those who don't or can't.
do it anyways. i worked with a guy who wore suits and ties most days because he was stylish. we ribbed him a little but he got respect because he looked so damned good.
Some people actually like uniforms. They don't like having to think about what to wear. Or people with sensory issues like wearing the same thing over and over and a uniform allows that without people acting like you're weird.
I wonder if any company has ever issued a uniform, said you can just wear this, but made it optional.
I'm one of them, but perhaps not for the reason you'd expect.
People tend to forget that uniforms offer a form of protection.
When I was in the military, my commanding officer was an extremely competent man, the likes of which I had never seen before and only rarely seen since. One day, I saw him leaving the base in his civilian clothes, and did a double-take. Here was a man in his early 40's dressed like an overgrown teenager: bleach-faded jeans, an oversized branded tee, flat brimmed hat (labels & holographic stickers still attached), etc. To put it bluntly, he looked like a punk. Had he shown up to work in that attire, and given me orders, it would have been an uphill battle for him to earn my respect.
I exercise a lot of caution when judging people's appearance, and I've long understood that each of us also harbors a degree of unconscious judgement. But this episode forced me to come to terms with the sheer magnitude of that unconscious influence, and with the fantasy that we can rid ourselves of it without sacrificing some amount of individuality. I've come to the conclusion that some degree of uniformity--perhaps just a dress code--can serve to facilitate the upward mobility of the disadvantaged. It's not perfect, but I think it's a whole lot better than today's "anything goes" standards.
Minimalism is always in. Even in high fashion, Issey Miyake, whose association with Steve Jobs is called out in the article, remains beloved beyond his death.
Perhaps it's not explicitly a uniform per se, but you could build a fashionable psuedo-uniform out of only a few garments relatively cheaply and without getting looks like you mentioned. That kind of fashion isn't for everyone, but neither is the color and fit maximalism that seem to dominate today's outfits.
I see/hear more and more people build an uniform of their own. Basically the same kind of tops and identical bottoms bought in set and renewed identical as they wear out. I'm half in that camp, and it's damn convenient.
When I worked as a mainframe engineer at IBM last century, the dress code was strictly suit and tie, and I carried my tools in a toolcase disguised as a briefcase.
It was quite the nightmare climbing inside a 3890 check sorter with suit and tie on. The machines were literally puiled high with oily paper dust due to the millions of checks that fired through them continuously and you aways emerged filthy and dusty. I constantly fielded questions from the computer operators as to why I had to wear a monkey suit when I was obviously more of a mechanic (sidenote: I married one so perhaps the suit had some sartorial impact after all).
At that time there was apparently only one IBM office in the world where the dress code was relaxed which was Darwin Australia due to the extreme heat. The dress code there was dress shorts and long socks, something like a safari suit.
I actually don't know if suits going out of fashion should be considered infantilization of one specific generation in particular; suits have been simplified progressively for decades before that. At some point the simplest suit fir casual everyday wear will be no suit.
The infantilization occurs with the relative decrease of formality from generation to generation. It's the fact that you'll never dress as formally at work as your parents did.
I see it the other way around. Newer generation aren't being imposed a codified uniform by older generations anymore and have a lot more freedom to express themselves through clothing, I think it's much less infantilising actually
I suppose the question at hand is whether it is infantile to want to express one’s individuality at all times, or whether it is infantile to assimilate into a group.
As with most things, both extremes are probably undesirable at the scale of a society. I also think it’s hard to deny that the needle has tipped very far in a particular direction.
You don't actually have freedom, there is still a uniform. The same thing will happen if you wear a suit to a jeans and a T shirt office as if you wore jeans and a T shirt to a suit office.
Oh boy oh boy oh boy, this brings back sweet & sour memories: about 10 years I had this idea of a web site for programmer/hacker types, even bought hackerstyle.com. It would have suggestions that you could select and also would include an “outfit compiler” that would process your selections to check for matching colors, fashion sense, etc. I got super hyped about this, and evidently had enough of a reality distortion field to convince a colleague to apply to YC with the idea.
You guessed it: we couldn't even make it to the interview round, she moved to CA and is now a successful director at Instacart, and I’m here reminiscing on a late lunch break.
Should have hold on to that domain, though, just checked and it’s for sale for $3000+.
I low-key like some dress codes, as it gives me an incentive to dress well without looking like a dork, and that I can brush off as "oh it's just the company rules".
The only popular fashion (if you can even call it that) I've ever observed with any consistency is "hoodie" and "graphic tee". More rare, but worth noting, is shorts-when-its-pants-weather. The lack of dress-code just translated into whatever a person would be wearing if they had stayed at home.
I wouldn't notice a person's socks unless they asked me to.
Fashion leather "work boots" or jump boots (e.g. Red Wing, Danner). Oddball, usually lightweight, sneakers. Selvedge jeans with the cuff roll (maybe hipster, maybe tech hipster—need context and other clothing cues to tell the difference). Expensive hiking & bouldering/rock-climbing brands, for shoes, boots, pants, and jackets, especially (meanwhile, normal fans of hiking who aren't doing a lot of very long hikes just wear shit from Costco). Merino wool everything. $100+ hoodies.
I just googled based on your comment. I assumed this was just socks with programming jokes written on them, but appearently it is actually a term for knee-high socks https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/programming-socks
I would say they were describing the people. I didn't realize you can't dress in comfortable clothing you like without making some kind of statement about gender roles or whatever.
That's what seems to be implied by the GP, though. The only thing being referenced in connection to that term is how those people were dressed, and that they were "gross".
That and loafers. I'd been slipping on my (tied) sneakers for years, while all that time I could have had a shoe designed for that and that looks way nicer and lasts far longer! In America, you can dress those all the way up to business formal and down to going-to-the-grocery-store! So versatile. What a fool I was.
Incidentally, we in (at least certain segments of) this industry definitely have a look. I've got a pretty good record of spotting tech workers in non-tech-heavy areas and settings based solely on clothes & affect taken in from a distance, and I don't just mean when one's wearing legible clothing with some tech slogans or logos on them.