When will the business suit return?

There was a time in the advertising business when you basically had two camps: the creatives and the suits. The creatives were the smart ones, I mean the arty ones, and the suits were the boring, I mean board room types. Creatives, the writers and art directors, were more casually dressed and if they felt a need to express just how creative they were, they would wear all black, perhaps with some funky sneakers thrown in for good measure. Suits, on the other hand, dressed for success. And if they were really obnoxious, they wore cuff links. They had to meet with clients and business associates and the like, while the creatives stayed back at the studio tossing Nerf balls and giving each other foot rubs.

Now, that Friday Casual has spread like a disease to every day of the week, there are no suits anymore. And the differences in dress are very subtle, even non-existent at times. Back when my father had his own advertising art studio, he was both a creative and a suit. He created on the drawing board but he also owned the business, had employees and met with clients. And in those days, he always wore a suit. Not just a coat and tie, mind you, but matching jacket and trousers. And this was in the days of airbrushes, stat cameras and darkrooms, rubber cement, and spray adhesives. He spent a lot of money on his wardrobe.

When I started out as a freelance copywriter, my father was my only role model. So when I met a client I dressed up. I looked like a banker (well, the way bankers used to look). Today, it is hard to tell the difference between a graphic designer, an account exec, the agency owner and a client. Even their offices look pretty much alike these days, thanks to computers.

Some men and women still wear suits because it makes them look like a big deal. Others wear suits because it is a way to show respect or that they care about something. But dressing better than your client is not always a good thing. And at some point I noticed that I was more dressy than the people I was meeting, and I started to scale back a bit. Today, dressing for a meeting entails wearing khaki pants instead of jeans. But I really think I could go to a meeting wearing just about any old Saturday yard work favorite, and no one would care or even notice. This is great for those of us who are hippies at heart. But I don’t think it will last.

I ran across a poll conducted last year that shows that while most managers (Baby Boomers and Generation Jonesers) think casual dress has actually improved productivity in business today, entry- and mid-level employees, who obviously skew younger, don’t. So, look for the pendulum of business attire to swing sometime in the future.

That will be too bad for the ad business. As dressiness ramps up in corporate America so it will also for the ad agency suits who interact in that world. And that will leave us creatives looking pretty scraggly or perhaps buying our first new suit in decades for when we have to go meet with a client. We’ll probably need to at least don a corduroy sport coat with our black turtleneck. But the real pity will be that creatives and suits will be much easier to differentiate in the workplace. Creatives will look like free spirits at best or slobs at worst and the suits will look polished yet uptight (although we know creatives can be the uptight ones). We will see each other differently. We might act differently. And I wonder if we’ll treat each other differently.

As a freelancer who spends most of his time in a home office (no I am not writing this in my underwear), I don’t interact with others as often as folks in office settings do (correction, I am in my underwear which is under other garments, you’ll be pleased to know). Still, I, for one, have enjoyed the equity in dress. It is easier to recognize each other as complete people, rather than stereotypes, people who can contribute creatively and strategically, regardless of our official titles.

Of course we could all dress in suits the way my dad did. Larry Tate and Darrin Stevens come to mind. A suit and a creative in a suit. But then, Darrin wasn’t very creative, was he? He came up with some fairly lame slogans, and always at the last minute. If he hadn’t had witches for relatives, I would have blamed this on the suit.

I have about two dozen ties collecting dust on a rack in my closet. They express my sensibilities in ways that a mere shirt can’t. There’s the tie depicting fountain pens. And there’s the one covered in punctuation marks. It looks like one big cartoon cuss word. There are several with fish, lures and fishing scenes. There are ones with sailboats. One with hula girls. One with forties era men’s hats. Even one covered in gorillas, which is great for wearing to safari-themed parties (I have been to exactly one of those). I haven’t worn most of them in years. But as a closet non-conformist, part of me wants to start wearing them again because nobody else does. Funny, then, how a symbol of strangling conformity can become something unexpected and rebellious. And it can be a tie to something bigger, like a passion or a hobby. Or even a father.

For a fun look at the McMann & Tate client list, click here.