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Thread: What does your suit look like?

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[quote=TOMSPENCER,265852]Back home in England I have plenty of suits. Mostly grey or dark blue pin-stripes. A couple of plain, dark blue suits. All either pure wool or a wool/cashmere mix. Some three-piece suits, some two piece.

I've never gone to work in casual clothes, despite the trend in British businesses these days for what they call "dress down Friday". I just can't get into a professional frame of mind if I'm not in a suit. There seems to my mind to be some link between casual attire and casual attitudes. At least, this was true in the places where I worked. I can't say whether my colleagues were particularly unprofessional before leaping at the chance to come to work in jeans and t-shirts, or whether the wearing of casual clothes at the office somehow came to influence their attitudes towards work.

Maybe I'm just a bit old-fashioned. I'm sure business can be done these days in far more relaxed ways (and far more relaxed clothes) than was possible in the past.

I remember being very careful to get the details of the suit right before my first job. Avoiding modern detailing (and running a mile from shiny suits) meant going to a traditional tailor. They can get the trouser leg to fall with just a single kink before resting, with turn-ups, on the fourth lace of a (properly laced), hand-made, Oxford pattern shoe. They can get all the details perfectly right - the way a suit should be.

Then I started my first day at work and discovered all my colleagues had cheap suits that looked fairly respectable but into which no thought what-so-ever had been put. It turned out that the suit didn't reflect much on the personality of the wearer. Depsite the fact that most of my colleagues had suits that I would consider an affront to professionalism, there were some really hard-working, serious people in amongst that group.

Here in China I have one tailored English suit that I brought with me, and one Chinese suit that I picked up for 250 yuan. The Chinese suit is really cheap, but not at all bad-looking. It gives me a real guilty pleasure to wear it. I never feel truly professional in it, but I know I look good in it.

Besides business suits I also have a morning suit (for weddings, garden parties and the like), a dinner jacket ('tuxedo') suit (for cocktail parties and evenings at the theatre), a plain black suit (for church), and a white tie tails suit (for banquets, balls and for looking fantastic).[/quote]

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