Marlon Durrant, owner of men's custom clothing company Md Bespoke, arranges a line of light denim shirts, in their Toronto retail space, on July, 8, 2021.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Now that the pandemic seems to be ending, sort of, and people are starting to go back to work in actual offices, at least some of the time, starting in the fall; now that working and living unshaven and unwashed from home in short shorts and sweatpants is an established habit of a wide swath of humanity; now, in other words, that things are starting to “return to normal” even though we have lost any idea of what normal will be, perhaps a word of condolence might be offered to the necktie.
I have 45 of them, not including the bowties (I know, mistake, pampered bulldog). They have hung limp and listless in my closet since before the pandemic, a veil of sad wallflowers who never get asked to dance anymore. But even my go-to favourites – the red-and-navy-striped Italian knit, the beautiful yellow silk print my daughter gave me from the Morgan Library in Manhattan, the cream-and-grey Gucci bequeathed by a long-dead friend – were getting out less and less before COVID. The pandemic simply finished them off.
As a pandemically assisted shift to casual clothing remakes not just the office and the board room but the fashion business in general, we can be forgiven for wondering what we’ll be wearing when we stride back (purposefully or not) into the office this fall. Here’s a safe bet: it probably won’t be a suit, and it certainly won’t be a tie. Nor will it be cheap. But it’ll definitely have four-way stretch. Let’s hope that’s a good thing.
The new casual wear, like this sand olive knit polo with jersey blazer, goes by many names: smart casual, elevated basic, athleisurewear and lifewear, according to Gotstyle co-founder Melissa Austria.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The handy thing about a tie – and one reason many devotees secretly lament its fading – was that it could instantly (if the owner had an inkling of how to wear it) make a suit or a shirt or a jacket more expressive.
“The tie was a wonderful, wonderful man’s accessory,” Larry Rosen, the chief executive of Harry Rosen Inc., the Canadian menswear chain, says. Note his use of the past tense. “Suits tend to be the same. But a tie lets you be an individual. In some ways, it’s sad to see its demise. But it’s also interesting to see the lessening of its importance.”
Ties were markers of rank and nobility and order from the day they first showed up in the early 1600s, when Croatian mercenaries employed by Louis XIV famously wore a strip of material around their necks (it probably doubled as a clasp for their jackets). Louis XIV liked the idea so much he made cravats (from Hrvati, for Croat) mandatory wear at court. Ties have been worn by men every day since – and, periodically, by women as well. That’s a 400-year run, which is longer than, say, parliamentary democracy. The cravat gave way to any number of iterations (steinkirks, solitaire bows, neckcloths) and eventually the tie as we know it.
But because ties are signifiers – of class, of status, of respect and even of subservience (a four-in-hand tie with a soft-collared flannel shirt was often worn by working men) – they have always been hated as much as they have been loved. The current anti-tie mood started with the tech kings of Silicon Valley, the richest and most envied capitalists of our time. They disdained ties as early as the first dot-com bust, preferring blue Oxford shirts and chinos and even Bond-style turtlenecks (mistake, see Mort in Bazooka Joe). Amazon’s Jeff Bezos doesn’t wear ties; neither does Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who dresses like a seamless alien.
“These people don’t wear suits,” David Swartz, an investment analyst at New York’s Morningstar Research who has covered the retail business for decades, says. “They have proven definitively that what you wear does not affect your profitability. They run the most successful companies in the world. And some of them can barely dress themselves.”
They prefer a flat look and a flat management structure. “The whole corporate structure has changed,” Mr. Swartz said. “And that has changed how people relate to one another. And that has changed the way people dress.”
Today you don’t need a tie to slyly express your besuited, hidden individuality: you can oil your beard, sculpt your do, post an earring, bare a tattoo. Oct. 18 may be International Tie Day, but the Neckwear Association of America, a manufacturer’s lobby, shut down way back in 2008 for lack of members. Ties have been called symbols of wage enslavement and colonial nooses. U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang, the Silicon Valley flat-tax gearhead, refused to wear a tie in the previous Democratic presidential primary debates. No one really noticed. The British Journal of Ophthalmology has blamed ties for increasing intraocular pressure and affecting the diagnosis and management of glaucoma; they’ve also been implicated (because they are seldom washed), as disease vectors, one reason doctors stopped wearing them in hospitals. Damn the tie! Even IKEA banned them.
Gotstyle has plenty more casual styles like Joop! button down denim shirt, and Circolo grey jersey blazer, left, a Sand linen striped shirt, and Blue Industry white knit polo with jersey knit blazer.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The force that has finally killed the tie – and traditional formal corporate dress in general – is known in retail circles as mass casualization. It sounds like something Hannah Arendt dreamt up. The pandemic simply amplified it. “People learned how to cook and eat at home during the pandemic,” Scotiabank retail analyst Pat Baker points out. “But they also learned how comfortable it is to wear casual clothing.”
Companies like Macy’s have claimed of late in conversations with institutional investors that suit and tie sales are on the rebound. But Ms. Baker and Mr. Swartz suspect that’s simply a reopening bump. “It’s never going to be the case that men are wearing suits the way they did, and most people I talk to think that change is permanent,” Mr. Swartz says.
There are many logical reasons to think so: a consensus that business travel will never recover now that corporations know meetings can be done on the cheap online, shorter in-office work weeks, a reduced number of workers in a smaller number of offices. All that means less dressing up, even at the executive level. Twenty years ago, suits and ties accounted for 60 per cent of Harry Rosen Inc.’s sales. Today it’s 10 per cent to 15 per cent, according to Mr. Rosen, the company’s CEO and the son of its founder. (Half that is online action, up from 10 per cent before the pandemic.)
The result has been carnage. Brooks Brothers and J. Crew, the Romulus and Remus of preppy American tailored menswear, both declared bankruptcy last year. Meanwhile other corporate clothing stalwarts are crumbling. Banana Republic (owned by Gap), which specialized in more formal work wear for women, had been struggling before COVID closed its doors for 300-odd days; sales during the pandemic simply dropped off a cliff. Club Monaco and Versace had their wings clipped as well.
Mr. Swartz, the analyst, hasn’t dutifully worn a suit and tie to the office in twenty years. He bought two suits last year – a brace of Hugo Boss outfits on sale at Nordstrom’s, for $950. The only time he wears them is when he has to appear on TV – one of the few places the old reliable uniform, the workhorse that solved so many male dressing dilemmas, still projects respect and authority, or at least a desire to be taken seriously. Everywhere else, it’s overkill. A corporate director I know, a well-dressed guy in his forties who works in deepest Bay Street, recently attended his first in-person board meeting in a year and a half. He wore a tie and blazer. “That was like a tuxedo, compared to what everyone else was wearing,” he said. The trauma sounded fresh.
Mr. Durrant looks at a booklet of textile samples in his Toronto retail space.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
So what will we be wearing at the office now that the office is a place we can go again, come fall? A hint: last week – with the pandemic not even close to packed up –Harry Rosen had its biggest week in knitwear in its 67-year history. Welcome to the netherworld of semi-casual dressing.
“I’m hearing a lot of guys saying, ‘I can’t wait to get back into the office in a suit,’ ” Melissa Austria, co-founder of Toronto’s Gotstyle Men’s Wear, says. “But I think we’ll get a lot of other guys in the new uniform, the stretch jersey jacket, the comfortable drawstring trousers, the tailored” – and tieless – “shirt.”
This is the terrifying, treacherous land of in-between wear that goes by many names – the smart casual, the elevated basic, “athleisurewear” and (Jesus wept) “lifewear,” the mosh of “sophisticated stretch style” and “stretch-blend Tech Joggers” and “cotton performance Ts.” It is the long-forbidden no-go zone between your wedding suit and your gym shorts, bro – what used to be known as the mysterious Kingdom of Sportswear.
It is not a place for the faint of heart or the self-conscious or the poor. At Harry Rosen’s, a Gio Ponti cotton hoodie ($596.99) and a pair of knee-length performance apparel shorts ($536.99) and some D&G custom 2.Zero sneakers ($1,145) will cost you more than you once paid for a fine Ermenegildo Zegna two-piecer. An unstructured, stretch cotton-blend bum-high sports jacket – for “alternate comfort” – with Dr. Denton elastic wrist cuffs and matching gabardine stretch work pants, a zesty look that is half car valet, half basketball warmup suit, tops out over $3000, making it a “semi-formal look,” the website insists, “that effortlessly transitions into polished weekend wear.”
Really? When has that transition ever happened successfully? In reality, the semi-formal bits never quite make it as weekend wear, or vice-versa, which is when you end up buying a second outfit to round out the inadequacies of the first. This is why retailers love sportswear.
Instead, for roughly the same price, you could visit Marlon Durant, a tailor at Md Bespoke in Toronto’s Yorkville for the past 20 years. You could have him make you a bespoke set or suit of clothes, in smart-casual or any other style, from the same or better modern stretch materials, or not, and have it actually fit every bend and angle and quirk of your body and appearance. The first thing Mr. Durant looks at when he makes a shirt, for instance, is the shape of his client’s face, because that dictates the collar. “I think the whole direction after the pandemic will be about comfort,” Mr. Durant believes. “Personal style, more than fashion. It’s going to be big, a beautiful thing.”
But athleisurewear has drawbacks as well as drawstrings. Stretch jersey may be a miracle fibre, but it still contains polymers, trading off breathability for give. A real estate agent I know recently closed a deal in a storied vacation town wearing a brand new pair of four-way stretch athleisurewear business shorts. (Yes. Imagine.) “Oh, I see gym class has ended,” the client said when he spotted them. A complicated signing then ensued, during which my acquaintance sat in a Lucite chair for an hour. “Between the plastic pants and the plastic chair,” he told me afterwards, “I was sweating so much that a Nile of perspiration ran down my thigh when I stood up.”
And while there are cool and comfortable fabrics available in the new hybrid workwear quiver, mixing them can be tricky. Under Melissa Austria’s guidance, I recently tried on a navy blue 0909 Italian jersey blazer. It was as light as a feather and cost $600. But then I decided to augment it with a pair of mid-blue Blue Industry slim fit (uh oh) jersey (oh my) stretch (ack) crosshatch (wow) pants (with drawstring waist!) that were so tight and clinging and body conforming my legs felt like two freshly formed bratwursts.
Ms. Austria also suggested, as the complement to my new “uniform,” a collared polo shirt in white jersey buttoned to the neck. Alas, it made me feel I should be holding Mummy’s hand to cross the street. The new fluidity of postformal, postpandemic menswear intermingles not just the formal and the informal, not just the male and the female, but life stages as well. “You can dress like a three-year-old,” an observant dandy friend of mine put it recently, “and that’s okay.”
Until it’s not, that is. Ms. Austria has now heard a year and a half’s worth of horror stories about the hideous get-ups men have sported in the new hybrid Zoom-casual home/office workspace. They include an intern in a singlet and a broker with no shirt at all. No wonder she has launched an online education series called Clothes of Conduct: How to Improve Your Work From Home Game.
The tie may be a goner, but some form of the suit will have a role in the postpandemic closet. A new crowd of high school and college graduates has been piling into Gotstyle. “I think there will be a new generation of men,” Ms. Austria says, “who because they grew up in tracksuits are going to want to put on a real suit, if only as a form of retaliation and rebellion. They still like what the suit represents, which is power.” If their suits somehow shatter their GenX fathers’ norms as well, so much the better.
Every generation tries to find its own form of sartorial freedom, clothing-wise. But thanks to social media, mass casualization and the pandemic, these shifts in the way we dress now rain down incessantly – creating a confusion the retail clothing industry has little interest in clearing up, because it sells more clothes. This is the era of ultracheap fast fashion, after all. Stores such as Zara and H&M and their progeny present dozens of quickly designed, rapidly manufactured “collections” of focus-grouped garments every year, as opposed to the two collections (fall and winter) designers sweated over twenty years ago. No wonder, according to The Atlantic, Americans buy a new piece of clothing every five days, on average – and almost immediately throw two-thirds of them out, with disastrous consequences for the environment. (A pound of cotton, to use an oft-reported example, needs 100 times as much water as a pound of tomatoes, and then there’s the landfill.)
But even fast fashion is on its way out. Disgusted with its ecological wastefulness, a new generation of consumers is already dressing in a more conscious way. The popular website therealreal.com, for instance, is a luxury consignment hub where you can find, among its many treasures, a used Zegna blazer for $75 – thereby saving the planet, the website helpfully notes, the 287 litres of water and 12 kilos of carbon a similar new garment would have required. The newest emerging trend, as others have noted, is to be well dressed using clothes we already own.
That might leave room for even an aging, spandex-averse fan of classic tailored menswear. Before I took my leave of Ms. Austria, I sent her a handful of my forlorn ties. She paired one of my favorites – a 30-year-old Gene Meyer abstraction, a French blue and chartreuse stripe on a brown and navy ground – with the Italian jersey blazer and a Joop! chambray button down shirt in navy blue ($178). It looked fantastic: original, updated and completely acceptable as either office or party wear. My old tie and its stretchy new buddies even hinted at that rarest quality of clothes, the one we hope emanates from whatever we try on: character, or at least what we want to believe is an authentic version of who we are.
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