I’ve always been partial to a good suit I’m a little particular about my patterns and my cufflinks but I like to think there’s an art to picking it all out and I wear them constantly when you’re on TV as much as I am you don’t have much of a choice but it’s not the staple of the office that it once was Silicon Valley billionaires have been wearing hoodies for maybe a decade now and earlier this year even Goldman Sachs the epitome of the Wall Street investment bank announced that it would be relaxing it’s dress code – so when CEOs are in sweats and Wall Street is business casual does this mean the death of the suit look I’m always reluctant to think that it’s really going to die because it’s been a part of men’s wardrobe for over a hundred years Jay Fielding knows a bit about suits he’s the editor and chief of Esquire magazine it’s waxed and waned and every kind of all these different things in the moment that happens a suit suddenly looks cool and really inventive again and throughout the year I go to Milan I go to Paris I see the shows before a lot of other people’s shows I’m highly aware that what I see on the runway is not always the most wearable thing to most men okay but they’re indications of what may happen right and what was interesting about this last group of shows was it almost everyone even the edgiest brands led with suits we see these guys strutting the red carpet with us Jason Momoa or Timothy sha’lame these guys look amazing right and it’s hard to think that if these guys come out on the red carpet that most other guys are gonna say I never want to look like that I just want my shirt on good okay okay red carpets weddings funerals for some occasions the suits not going anywhere but if the everyday suit the five days a week to work suit is on its way out that could create a tricky situation for retailers whose business is built on those customers it would be a difficult time to be Men’s Wearhouse at this moment Laurie wax is a retail analyst and expert if you will on retail in fact she’s an expert on a lot of things to me because she happens to be my wife what do you think the biggest change would be if I stop wearing suits I’m afraid that I would have to give up some more of our closet space back home so you might as well just stick in suits okay okay back to Men’s Wearhouse we been in periods like the 70s where there was a flare silhouette or the 80s where you have the big padded shoulders and that kind of evolution was really good for a place like Men’s Wearhouse at the time and they just have to continue to try to evolve to stay up I don’t think that the suit is going away but when you’re not going to be wearing it five days a week it is going to be difficult for them to have the kind of sales volume that they’ve had historically in a statement Men’s Wearhouse said they help men love the way they look for work and the occasions that matter whether that be a suit or a sport coat with jeans what is the evolution of men not wearing a suit to work mean for other parts of clothing that men wear we’ve seen sort of a sock trend in the last few years so a category that I never thought I’d be talking about is men’s designer sneakers it’s become an explosive category and you’re also seeing add-on parts to it so you’ll see kind of a zip in sweatshirt hoodie that will go outside of the jacket so there will be different layering pieces different accessories that will kind of make the suit into something that this generation can call their version of it hmm so maybe if the weekday suit is on its way out we’ll start to see the return of the weekend suit but with a twist paired with sneakers or modern fabrics that seem a little more appropriate for the club than for the office but what about the office if workers aren’t wearing suits they got to be wearing something we’re moving away from corporate chic to Silicon Valley chic and it’s all about the hoodies and jeans right this is where this idea originated you know with Mark Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs dawn Karen is a fashion psychologist she studies how what we wear affects how we think and she says when it comes to Zuckerberg and Jobs there was a method to their madness they sort of perpetuated this notion of okay I don’t care what I want to wear today and this is going to allow me to put more emphasis into my productivity into what I have to do today I can’t imagine that be a great thing for all of us to say well I can’t burn any calories on getting dressed because I got to save all my calories for the marathon that is going to be my day it isn’t getting dressed sort of an important part of your life it is but we make research shows that we make about unhung 108 decisions per minute so we may suffer from some type of decision fatigue so what’s fashion fashion can be one less decision clearly there’s still a lot to figure out in our new suit ‘less world but when it comes down to it what I really want to know is how will all of this affect me if I have to wear a suit and a tie to work every day a certain amount of decision-making is taken away from me and now I’m in this world where particularly for guys who are not used to dressing casually for work how do you how do you navigate that I would actually tell them to go back to the suits go for what you know go what feels genuine authentic to yourself so you can wear a suit on the weekends and if you want you can still wear a suit to work so maybe the suits not actually dying after all it’s just evolving finding its true believers and new reasons to exist what that means for workplaces and retailers remains to be seen but for now instead of a requirement maybe a suit is just something you can put on and you want to feel your best hey NBC News viewers thanks for checking out our YouTube channel subscribe by clicking on that button down here and click on any of the videos over here to watch the latest interviews show highlights and digital exclusives thanks for watching
As found on Youtube