(With apologies to Katherine Anne Porter)
Gentlemen, burn your ties!
The tie is dead. The suit is dead. White shirts are dead. Cuff links are… downright archeological. Send a card to comfort Ross Perot. Send condolences to Derrill Osborn, the elegant director of men’s clothing for Nieman Marcus. Raise your margarita glass to Tony Bahama, our new sartorial leader.
These thoughts occurred as I slipped into rush hour traffic in downtown Denver on my motorcycle, having completed three days of interviews at Founders, Invesco, and Janus.
The score?
Portfolio managers, eight. Ties, zero.
It was Dockers and golf jerseys all the way, with an occasional sport shirt. Business attire is history. The future of men’s clothing can be expressed in two words: costumes and chaos.
What was I wearing during those three days?
When you travel by motorcycle— which is a lot more pleasant than air travel these days— you don’t have much choice. My ancient BMW, a lovely 1978 R100RS, has two side bags. One of them is devoted to work: my computer, electronic camera, and the inevitable collection of documents and connective do-dads. I had one bag, about the size of the smallest rolling bags for airplane travel, for any clothing to be worn during six days. During that time I would be riding the 400 miles between Santa Fe and Denver, interviewing fund managers and attending a financial planning conference in Keystone. (Readers who would like to read more about the ride should visit Installment Biker.)
That means no room for a sports jacket, let alone suit, shirt(s) and tie(s). So I had no choice: it was boots, a pair of rolled slacks, and jerseys. Period.
In fact, since only one of the managers was over 35 and all the others had been born after I graduated from college, necessity worked out very well. An older, bearded man arriving in a business suit, tie, and traditional wingtip shoes might have made them self-conscious about playing with all those billions.
Which brings us to the real dilemma.
Now that the suit is dead, will men ever know what to wear? Will the women in our lives be able to stand it? This could be a major social crisis.
I can tell you, personally, that I am deeply concerned. Shortly before our wedding I told my wife that I might never be a Clothes Horse but if she was patient, I might become a Clothes Pony.
She thought I was joking.
Actually, I was exaggerating. Clothes Chihuahua is more like it, devolving toward Clothes Ameba.
Like most men, I suffer from SGDS or Shopping Gene Deficiency Syndrome. The confusing messages of business life haven’t helped. I haven’t bought a suit in years. The last suit-like object that I bought was a tuxedo, purchased at Nordstrom’s when I realized that I had more need to wear a tuxedo than I had need to wear a suit.
I keep a blue suit as a costume for speaking events and, last time I looked, kept three or four other suits in Terminal Reserve for occasions that no longer happen. These suits are like the Well Preserved Rooms of Your Adult Children— you look at them from time to time but never go in. I haven’t bought a tie in years and think my remaining supply of white shirts may last to expectancy.
I am not unique. Millions of men are experiencing the same weirdness. In addition, this change goes far beyond business offices. You can see it in restaurants. Only a handful of restaurants in any city, if that, dare to require men to wear a jacket and tie. Now signs sternly warn that patrons are expected to wear shoes and shirts. A significant portion of the population routinely dresses as through they were spending the day at the Laundromat.
Social chaos for you and me translates into economic hardship for the clothing industry. If you figure that a better quality suit, shirt, and tie now sets you back nearly $1,000— with plenty of opportunity to raise the ante— even the fanciest business casual comes in at half that and Dockers Casual comes in at about $100, a reduction of nearly 90 percent.
Basically, clothing manufacturers have no way to regain the lost revenue of suit and tie.
Curious about the market impact, I checked the Morningstar stock database. It has 56 publicly traded clothing manufacturers. When you average their performance, their total return to investors has been negative over the last 5 years, a loss of 1.15 percent a year. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 Index was rising 26.23 percent a year. As clothing stock investors were losing their proverbial shirts, the value of most stocks was tripling.
Clothes once made the man. Now they don’t even make the market.
(c) A.M. Universal, 1999