Business Dress

Business dress that looks good and blends in at the same time. Charcoal suit, light blue end on end shirt with white collar and cuffs, a maroon silk necktie with white houndstooth pattern, and a light blue and white silk and cotton pocket square.


On the feet, black cap toe oxfords. And then patterned hose. They may not be completely discreet but I do have a weakness for them.

What's Style?

What is style? To me, it's not just good taste. A man whose regular garb consists of two button suits in conservative cloth, black oxfords, white shirts and solid neckties lacks individuality, and without individuality there can be no style.

Personal style is a consistent gestalt of individual choices, with the emphasis on individual. Where is the individual in a crowd wearing striped suits, Hermes ties and Gucci loafers?

That said, style can be consistent with business dress. The dress in the photo from Alan Flusser Custom is made up of conservative elements. It's the small touches that add individuality, like the double breasted jacket with a stripe alternating single and double beads. A uniform, but an individualized one.

That's style.

Summer Scarves

There are times in warm weather when a jacket is appropriate but a necktie and dress shirt are a bit more than man needs. When that's the case, try tieing a scarf in a four in hand knot and wearing it over a tee shirt under a jacket. It's a neglected warm weather look for travel, resort or casual wear, and particularly useful when the occasion can't take an ascot or neckerchief.

Scarves for summer should be lighter weight wool or even cotton toweling rather than winter cashmere or silk, particularly if it's humid.

Suits and Socks

Worn with trousers cut to cover the top of the shoe, socks can be a secret pleasure under a quiet facade. Wear them with braces, also concealed, in a similar unexpected color. Above the waist, a light blue broadcloth shirt, navy oxford weave necktie and a navy pocket square with white dots.

The Shaping of a Hat

I received an email from Art Fawcett last week with some photos of my in-process beaver fedora, asking that I choose the ribbon color for it. The initial choices were varieties of medium gray, which I thought had too much contrast. The next possibility was black, above, which was too dark.

Notice that Art has given the hat a simple center dent and side pinches in his studio. It has a high crown - I'd asked for a hat that could have been made in the 1930's, and men wore crowns that were about 3/4" higher than most of the hats made today.

The charcoal ribbon seemed ideal to me. It offers just a bit of textural contrast, like my Lock hats. I resisted an offer to add a colored stripe to the ribbon.

And then the hat arrived, beautifully packaged in a large hat box. During the journey, the crease and pinches had come out, leaving what appeared to be an enormous felt dome, nearly six inches high and looking rather like a turban with a brim. At least it did until after I spoke to Art, who reminded me that a crease would lower the height of the crown significantly.

The call with Art gave me the courage to bash a deep crease into the crown. And now my hat looks ready for September.

The Cut of Your Shirt

Only a bit of a shirt shows at your wrists and below your neck, which is why the collar is the most important part of a shirt. Consider poor Stanley Tucci here, unbecomingly costumed for his role in The Devil Wears Prada. The fit of his collar is classic, with what appears to be just enough room to insert a couple of fingers between shirt and neck and about a half inch of shirt above the back of his jacket. But the proportion is off - the points of his collar are too long for his head.

Proportion isn't difficult to achieve with a couple of simple rules of thumb. Men with round faces should wear longer collars and men with long faces, wider collars like the spread. A long neck requires a collar with a higher band and vice versa. The average man's straight point collar should be about 3" long, plus or minus a quarter. Larger men can add another quarter inch and smaller ones subtract it.

But for the collar, only a couple other elements are important for shirts that will live under jackets all the time. For one, the shirt tails should be long enough so that they stay tucked in. That requires about six inches of fabric below the trouser waist. And for another, the shirt cuffs should fall to the base of the thumb (if a man's jackets are cut to end at this wrist bone, this dimension will produce the requisite half inch of visible shirt cuff between jacket and hand).

The thumb actually gives the lazy shirt maker a way an easy way to achieve fit as he can (and usually does) simply make the sleeves a bit long knowing that the width of the hand will make the fit appear fine. This is so easy to achieve that when a man appears in a jacket that shows no shirt cuff, as did the Princes of England at the recent Combined Cavalry Old Comrades Parade, it merely points out the unforgiveable sloppiness of their tailor.

Ocean's Thirteen Pacino Style

I've seen plenty of photos of Brad Pitt's lounge lizard look (and Matt Damon's prep version of it) in Ocean's Thirteen, the new movie from Warner Brothers. But costume designer Louise Frogley's best work was done for Al Pacino, the inheritor of the overdressed mantle from Carl Reiner, who wore it in Ocean's Twelve.

Pacino, who plays the evil casino head, is clad head to toe in Battaglia, apparently a personal favorite of his. There's a lot to like about his clothes, or there would be if he wore each piece separately. Pinstriped suits are powerful day wear by themselves. Adding a white collared shirt is risky but doable. A paisley tie and silk square put it over the top even though they are interesting pieces that bring their own colors while relating well to what's already there. Changing the silk square for plain white linen would help a lot.

In the second photo, Pacino's fuschia silk necktie would have been better worn with a blazer at a Sunday afternoon garden party. I believe this scene takes place in the evening, and a solid navy worsted would let him get away with wearing a silk square if he toned the ensemble down a couple of steps. As it his, his clothes compete with the ladies to each side of him. The women win going away.


Some critics have said that the Ocean’s series has had more influence on menswear than any movie since The Godfather. I'm afraid that most of that influence has been for the bad - Pitt sets gangster dress back twenty years - but Pacino is not the principal problem. Here his necktie is once again nicely coordinated, picking up the stripe in his shirt, in an unfortunate color and paired with a flashy square that's too similar. You could wear it, but you shouldn't want to.

Dressing in the Free World

Looking at photographs of the heads of state of the Group of 8 nations has convinced me that we will learn little from looking at the dress of political men anywhere. So I am not going to repeat this type of essay for a while.

Nor am I going to waste our collective time bemoaning the lack of white linen in our leaders' breast pockets as our global challenges go deeper than that. Just as England's Prince Charles is photographed in jackets whose collars stand away from his neck now that he's switched to made to measure suits from Turnbull & Asser, the leaders of the free, semi-free and not so free world appear to have a disinterest in tailoring except as it fulfills its role as a uniform.



The poorly fitted collar tradition is honored by Vladimir Putin (right), whose statesmanlike dress could be improved by showing some shirt cuff and improved still more if he switched to a better tailor.


Canada's Stephen Harper shares Mr. Putin's fit problems but is at least showing a bit of cuff in this photo.


A lot has been written about Tony Blair's contribution to the decline of the British clothing industry. By global leader standards he's not terrible (on the right in the photo), but I don't understand why no-one on Savile Row has convinced him to switch from ready to wear suits so he could get rid of the roll of cloth behind his neck when he's seated. His trousers and his coat sleeves could stand to be shorter, he should save his black slip-ons for his off duty hours, and for god's sake get rid of the jacket with five buttons on the sleeve.


Posterity will remember George W. Bush for a number of things, among the the least of them the black boots with the presidential seal that he wore in the photo with a dinner jacket. He's usually respectably done up in suits but his evening clothes argue for addition by subtraction.



Nicholas Sarkozy's clothes (left) seem to suit him a bit better than the others we've seen so far. He pays homage to the French gabardine tradition with a two piece that's a lighter gray than is customarily seen on politicians of any nationality. And his shoes have tassels! That's fairly radical politics for a conservative.




I like most of what I see from Shinzo Abe. He seems representative of the many Japanese men that have paid more attention to Western dress traditions than their peers from the countries that originated it. That said, the photo is of his well turned out predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi.

Italy's Romano Prodi honors his country's clothing industry with suits that actually appear to fit him, in subdued patterns that add a bit of interest compared to the sea of navy blue that will surround him at the G8 meeting at Heiligendamm this week. And the pale blue shirt is a better idea than politician white.



Finally, Angela Merkel of Germany (center, in blue). Jackets and trousers done reasonably well but in this daytime photo she'd have done better to choose a pair in charcoal rather than black. Hillary Clinton, please take note.

Business Dress Conformity

In the United States, society today is in favor of each of us dressing as he pleases without consideration for any larger group norm. Most restaurants no longer have dress codes and evening dress is not prescribed at the opera.

But in those parts of the business world that still hold with conservative business dress, and that's most of Europe and Asia as well as midwestern and Northeastern cities in North America, there is still a dress standard.

Meeting expectations is important. The wrong clothes can get in the way of ordinary business transactions by diverting attention or sending signals that a person "is not one of us," particularly among bankers, civil servants, and people in professional services (excluding IT where it's only slightly unfair to say that the standard of dress is execrable everywhere in the world).

The photograph was taken last year at an investment conference in a resort hotel in France in the summer, and everyone is wearing a suit although they are at the seaside.



Imagine the surprise of a first-time attendee whose U.S. conference experience led him to expect a group dressed in polos and trousers. When visiting an unfamiliar place on business, there are only five things to remember in order to stay safely in the club:

• Dress as if for a job interview or an IPO road show - the way the senior person you are meeting will be dressed


• The uniform is a navy or charcoal gray single breasted suit, a dress shirt, black oxfords, and a necktie, with no more jewelry than a wedding ring, dress wristwatch and optional cufflinks


• If someone says to dress "smart casual," they mean jacket/blazer, dress trousers, dress shoes and a necktie


• "Formal" on an invitation usually means black tie but get clarification - it can mean white tie and tails. It never means a suit, though a dark navy suit, black shoes, white shirt and black bow tie can get by most of the time


• Call ahead (even anonymously) for clarification of any questions.

Business dress conformity doesn't mean expensively dressed. Most of the suit-wearing people in the world wear inexpensive clothing, but the uniform can be spiffed up in subtle ways. For example, white shirts are a bit bourgeois during the day. Substitute cream with a navy suit and light blue with a charcoal suit. Add a solid navy tie with the gray suit, a charcoal tie with the navy, and show a quarter inch of white linen handkerchief in the jacket's breast pocket for a more sophisticated look that still won't raise any eyebrows.

Never underestimate the power of the suit. Here's one man's story:

"I was in a meeting room in Ludwigsburg, Germany with 150 other American managers of a German automaker. I was the only American wearing a suit and tie. Our host, a member of the Vorstand (Board of Directors) enters, surveys the room, walks over to me, introduces himself by first and last name, omitting his honorific ‘Doktor,’ and spends the rest of the evening talking to me. It shows you what a suit is worth in Europe."