The Demise of the Suit, and the Pinstriped Old Order It Stood For, Need Not Be Mourned

I’ve written a few columns mourning the death of the dress code and the social contract. Today I want to make an admission that will surprise those who have read my previous articles for the Sun: the old order deserved to go.The suit, as most men wore it for most of the twentieth century, was never simply a garment. It was a membership card. It told a room who belonged in it before a single word was spoken — and it did that job by design. The country club blazer, the boardroom pinstripe, the black-tie dinner. All these were not neutral standards of excellence that anyone could meet with enough effort. They were built, often deliberately, to be easiest for the people who already had money, the right last name, the right skin, the right sex, and hardest for everyone else. A dress code that requires a $3,000 wardrobe and an inherited sense of which fork to use isn’t a standard. It’s a velvet rope wearing the costume of a standard.So when people tell me the suit’s decline is a tragedy, I have to stop them in their tracks. Good riddance to that version of it. A culture that quietly used clothing to sort who mattered from who didn’t was never something that was worth preserving intact. Frankly I’m not interested in playing nostalgic for a gate I’d have been kept on the wrong side of a hundred years ago myself.Here’s where I lose the people who think this makes me an ally of the hoodie. We didn’t replace the old order with a better one. We replaced it with nothing. And nothing is not progress — it’s a vacancy, and vacancies get filled by whatever’s laziest. What we call “casual” today isn’t casual in the way a linen shirt on a summer evening is casual. It’s an absence of decision-making dressed up as authenticity. We tore down a gate that kept people out, and instead of building a door that lets the right people through on merit, we just left a hole in the wall and called it liberation.That’s the actual failure, and it’s worth being precise about it: the suit’s sin was gatekeeping by birthright. The fix for gatekeeping by birthright is not the abolition of standards. It’s a standard anyone can meet through effort instead of inheritance. Burn the country-club blazer that only speaks fluent old money. Keep the discipline that put it on in the first place.I think about this every time I hear someone defend the hoodie-and-sneakers uniform as some kind of meritocratic triumph — as if Silicon Valley’s founders proved that talent doesn’t need decoration. It’s a nice story. It also happens to be a story that only works if you already have the billion dollars. A 24-year-old with no name recognition and no funding doesn’t get taken more seriously in a hoodie; he gets mistaken for the delivery guy. The uniform of “I don’t need to try” was only ever available to people who’d already won. Everyone else adopted it anyway, because imitation is easier than discipline, and nobody built them a better option.That’s the gap I actually care about. Not a return to the country club. A door that isn’t inherited.Models at Paris Fashion Week in 2023. Edward Berthelot/Getty ImagesWhat would that look like? A standard built on effort instead of bloodline. One where showing up dressed with intention signals that you respect the room and the people in it, full stop, regardless of your last name or your net worth; not a costume that costs $3,000 to access, and not a costume that costs nothing because it demands nothing. Something in between that any man can walk into if he’s willing to put in the requisite thought.That’s a harder thing to build than either extreme. Gatekeeping is easy — just make the price of admission something most people don’t have. Total casualness is easy too — just ask nothing of anyone. What’s hard is a standard that’s demanding and open at the same time. That’s the only version of “dressing well” worth resurrecting, and it’s the only version I’m interested in.So I’m not here to eulogize the old suit. I watched it exclude people who had every bit as much discipline and character as the men it let in, and I don’t want it back exactly as it was. Burn the gatekeeping. Just don’t tell me discipline burned with it. Build the door instead of the wall — and make it one any man can walk through, if he’s willing to put in the effort the old one never required of the people it was prepared to let in.But what replaced the well-worn suit is worse, because at least the old order asked something of a man. The new one doesn’t even bother.

The Demise of the Suit, and the Pinstriped Old Order It Stood For, Need Not Be Mourned

More from the New York Sun

Rahm Emmanuel, a Likely 2028 Candidate, Says in Israel That Unconditional Support Must Come to an End

Princes Harry and William Avoid Each Other at London as Mystery Deepens Over Whether Prodigal Prince Will See King

Oregon Asks Court To Block Paramount Skydance’s Merger With Warner Bros. Discovery

New York Lawmaker Calls for Tariffs Over Canada’s U.S. Booze Bans

Behind Argentina’s Shield: A Jewish Legacy Meets an Egyptian Coach’s World Cup Meltdown

Appeals Court Blocks Portion of Florida ‘Stop Woke Act’ Restricting Professors’ Speech on Race, Gender

Abbott Orders Investigation Into Texas Hospital for Advertising Birth Tourism

Apple Hopes a Surge of New Products Will Fix Core Problems