It doesn't suit me

When my daughter told me to get ready for one of the most important moments in her professional life, she commanded told me to do one thing, which she phrased something like this: "I know you don't own a suit and don't care for one, so I want you to rent one for the event."

We fathers are suckers--we do whatever our daughters order want us to do, and I did ;)

I felt like I was somebody else in that outfit.  But then, the great bard said that all the world's a stage and we are merely actors with roles to play.  And often those roles that we play call for special costumes, I suppose.

Living in the Pacific Northwest means that not only is there no expectation of wearing suits, we even rarely encounter suits staring down at us.  As one writer joked, here in the Pacific Northwest, people go to work as if at any moment they would drop everything and go on hikes instead.  You cannot go hiking wearing a suit! ;)

No wonder then that I love this take on the power suit losing power: "The suit was once the uniform of the powerful and a requirement for every man. Now, people mostly wear suits when they’re in trouble."

In the faculty world, male candidates wear suits, maybe be, during their job interviews.  (I did not.)  And then after they are hired, well, it is back to the casual style.  But, of course, we do that because we can.

But middle-class hotel clerks, salespeople, and job candidates cannot decide to ditch their suits the way tech workers, bankers, and lawyers have. “There’s a class element to it,” Clemente says. “In order to say I don’t have to wear a suit you have to be of a certain socioeconomic class.”

Class markers.  We are privileged enough to do whatever we want to do.  The under-privileged, however, don't have many choices.

Women perhaps shrug at these issues.  After all, they have been fighting dress codes throughout history.  In their case, they are required to carry on with the "tradition" even as men do whatever they want to do. (More here, here, and here.)  The death of the power suit is making their lives also better:

The disappearance of the suit at the executive level has also possibly benefited women, according to Karen Pine, a fashion psychologist at Hertfordshire University in England. “In the past, women had to dress like men to reach senior positions in the workplace,” she has said. “Now they can dress as they like and assert their individuality through their work attire, without fear of bumping up against the glass ceiling.”

Clothes don't make the man, nor the woman.