Vol. 146: The age of informality

Why I no longer wear a tie

Alone in the Sahara desert and dying of thirst, an emaciated man spies, on the distant horizon, a solitary figure astride a camel. Desperately, he crawls in that direction.

“Water! Water!” he shouts at the rider.

“I have no water,” the rider replies, displaying a colorful array of men’s ties. “I’m a tie salesman. Would you like a tie?”

“I don’t need ties!” the man’s screams. “I need water!”

He continues on his desperate way until, finally, in the distance he sees an oasis, complete with palm trees and an elegant hotel. He makes his way to the hotel’s front door.

“Water! Water!” he shouts at the doorman.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the doorman replies. “We can’t let you in without a tie.”

IBM goes casual

That joke, incomprehensible today, was common currency less than 50 years ago. I well recall a time when adult males were not allowed in respectable restaurants without a tie— and some restaurants always kept a few extra ties on hand for any maverick who didn’t have his own.

In a matter of maybe a few decades after 1980, the centuries-old tradition of dressing up for business, for church, for an evening on the town all but vanished from American life. The clothes we wear today— men and women alike— still send a message, but it’s often the opposite of the message we sent a generation ago. Expensive suits once connoted wealth or status; today more often they’re a giveaway that the wearer is a salesperson, a chauffeur, a funeral director, a maître d’, or some other type of supplicant. (On second thought, even most maître d’s don’t wear suits anymore.)

Conversely, the T-shirt, once an item of underwear, is now worn by business executives of both genders to the office and to expensive restaurants, and not just in Silicon Valley. “Dress-down Fridays” or “casual days,” when employees were permitted and even encouraged to wear casual clothes, became permanent fixtures at major corporations like Chase Bank, Citibank, American Express— even IBM, whose chief executive Louis Gerner announced in 1996, “IBM will do away with its stuffy image. IBM is going casual.”

Nixon’s armor

Not long ago, an evening on the town was an opportunity for the urban upper classes to showcase their finery; but today, any patron dressed in a tux or evening gown is likely to feel like an exhibit in a freak show, and even people wearing ties or heels may feel out of place. I used to worry if I was appropriately dressed for an evening at the orchestra or the theater. Last Saturday at the Philadelphia Orchestra concert, I counted fewer than a dozen men wearing ties, not including the ushers and musicians. The fellow seated next to me was wearing blue jeans.

This isn’t necessarily a complaint. In the corporate world, office dress-down days may ease tension, improve communication between managers and workers, and instill a sense of togetherness. Conversely, dressing-up erects barriers around our real selves. As Gary Wills once perceptively noted, Richard Nixon was “the most doggedly dressed man imaginable… His rigid wall of decorum in dress and manner is one of the means he uses to fend off the world… This armor makes his stiltedness less noticeable.” Come to think of it, has anyone seen Trump without a suit and tie, other than on a golf course?

When the hippies grew up

The current revolt against formalism began with the 1960s protests against the Vietnam war and the suited men who conducted it. Eventually those counterculture hippies grew up to run society with the same preference for substance as opposed to image.

At the same time, white-collar work was transformed from clerical to technological. The armies of drones performing repetitive, mechanical functions in banks, insurance companies, and brokerage houses were replaced by computer nerds doing real brain work– that is, people who resisted regimentation and felt no need to impress anybody. Meanwhile, the women’s movement helped foster a revolt against constricting garters and girdles, not to mention downright painful high heels and pointed toes. In an age when business transactions were increasingly conducted by phone, fax, or computer, how you look became increasingly irrelevant.

Until the 1970s, fashion designers functioned as dictators. But in retrospect, we can see that they ruled much like Robespierre, who observed shortly before he lost his head, “I must find out where the people are going, so I can lead them.” For my money, the real revolutionary of that period was Perry Ellis, who rose from near obscurity in 1976 to the head of a $100 million a year fashion empire within five years on the previously heretical notion that women should wear what’s comfortable.

The Perry Ellis woman

Before Ellis introduced his “natural look,” the fashion industry operated on the basic premise that a woman derives self-assurance from the knowledge that she is well dressed. Ellis, by contrast, felt that anyone who uses clothing as a crutch is badly deluded. Thus, his clothes appealed to women who were already sufficiently confident to take risks— including the risk of dressing down to casual hand-knit sweaters and woolly socks, friendly little pleated shorts, voluminous wool skirts, cutoff pants, and dimple-sleeved jackets.

I met Ellis in 1983 when the Chicago Tribune Magazine assigned me to profile him. The Tribune’s editor thought it would be a gas to confront the reigning high prince of fashion with someone like me, who knew and cared nothing about clothes. But it turned out Ellis and I were two peas in a pod.

“People are starving in Bangladesh,” was the first thing I said to him. “In that case, why should anyone care about fashion?”

“I couldn’t agree more,” he replied eagerly. “I just can’t understand why people take clothes so seriously… I mean, I design clothes to produce them and sell them, but I’m very aware that you can’t take them home to bed with you and make love to them. All of those people who will put their careers before love and health and friends must suffer from an emptiness that I just can’t imagine.”

Perry Ellis is gone now, but his spirit has survived longer than he could have imagined.

High school reunion, ten years later

Proponents of dressing up argue that you don’t do it for yourself; you do it as a sign of respect for others and for your community. That’s certainly something we seem to have forgotten. It’s also true that fixing oneself up is a natural instinct: aboriginals paint their bodies and put rings in their noses; the ancient Egyptians wore exotic makeup long before the Christian era; Native Americans used warpaint and feathers. But these primitive designs all had to do in some way with creating a sense of community. Today’s strongest communities are being formed through email and websites, and you don’t need a suit to sit in front of a computer.

At my 25^th high school reunion in 1985, my classmates arrived with every hair, every tie, every dress, every color-coordinated ensemble in place. Ten years later the same classmates showed up at our 35^th reunion in open-collar shirts, slacks, and sandals. When someone remarked upon this change, one of my classmates replied, “It means we’re past the age when we have to impress anyone.”

Well, maybe. But it also means we live in an age when probably too many people feel the need to impress the world with how little they need to impress the world.

Death of an heiress

So where, then, do I fit in? As a journalist, I try to avoid calling attention to myself and to wear whatever will put my subjects at ease. This isn’t always easy. For example, in 1974 I was working on a magazine story about the death of Fernanda Wanamaker, the department store heiress who had jumped or fallen from the balcony of her New York City apartment. One day I put on a suit and tie to interview some Wall Street investment bankers who had known her. Immediately afterward, I went to a blue-collar bar to interview two cops who had discovered Fernanda’s body. Here, of course, my business suit was totally out of place. (Today, on the other hand, the Wall Street bankers would be wearing T-shirts, and so would I.)

Although I work in a one-man office, until recently I wore a tie to work every day, for two reasons: first, to remind myself that this was work, not pleasure; and second, because I never knew whom I would run into.

One day I had a visit from Sam Katz, a municipal finance consultant and filmmaker who had twice run for mayor of Philadelphia. He was wearing a knit open-collar sport shirt, and he looked at me incredulously.

“You’re wearing a tie?” he said.

“Well, I never know when a mayoral candidate will stop in,” I replied.

California lawyers

It took the Covid pandemic of 2020 to finally cure me of the tie habit. I spent the first six months of the pandemic working from home. When I finally returned to my office building, I was one of only perhaps a dozen people working in an 18-story building. Nobody cared what I was wearing, so neither did I. Nowadays I wear a tie maybe twice a year at most. Even in synagogue, I usually wear an open collar shirt, as does most every other man in the congregation, and sometimes even the rabbi.

Today a tie seems like a downright strange and pretentious affectation. I find myself wondering: Whoever needed such a thing?

One last story. In 1997, when I was editor of the Philadelphia Forum, my publisher, while vacationing in Los Angeles, was injured in an auto accident that incapacitated her for several months. The insurance settlement struck her as inadequate, so she sued the insurance company. The plaintiff and defense lawyers, both Californians, rented a Philadelphia hall and flew in to spend a day taking depositions from her employees to determine the extent to which her managerial judgment had been affected by the crash.

That morning, I wondered, “What’s the appropriate attire for a deposition?” I supposed it was like going to court, so I should wear a suit. But I really, really didn’t feel like wearing a suit. Instead, I compromised by wearing a blue blazer, grey slacks, and a blue-and grey-striped tie, hoping that would suffice to demonstrate my respect for the legal profession. Need I tell you that both California lawyers showed up wearing T-shirts?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com