Cultural ties
by Osita Nwanevu
What do these two pictures have in common?
Up top, we have a group photo of Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden before their headline-making March fundraiser in New York City. And below, the attendees of a 2022 G7 summit in the Bavarian Alps. There are no neckties in either photo, but their absence is less interesting than who’s decided to ditch them. The most powerful people on the planet—including a few men who have or have had the ability, technically speaking, to extinguish life on Earth several times over—are increasingly opting for a mode of dress that is still generally called “business casual” but that we might as well just call business now. They are formal and formidable, but affectedly and conspicuously at ease; not relatable, exactly, but angled in the direction of relatability. All it took was losing the ties.
The tie has been on life support for ages, but there are signs all around that we might finally be ready to pull the plug for good. If he’s remembered for nothing else, which seems plausible, Andrew Yang will go down in history for bringing business casual to the presidential debate stage in 2019. On the red carpet, GQ’s Max Berlinger counted at least eight prominent attendees and presenters who went without ties at this year’s Oscars. And in an August Gallup poll, 32 percent of American men reported wearing “a shirt and slacks or other casual business clothes” to work—mostly without a tie, we might presume—while only three percent reported wearing a full suit “or other professional clothing.”
Tielessness, then, is one of the few cultural trends genuinely tying the country together, from Washington and Hollywood to Main Street. On the surface, it’s a positive one. Derek Guy, the menswear guru better known as @dieworkwear on Twitter, wrote a nice essay some years back about the shifting values that brought about the decline of the suit and its accouterments. “These changes in fashion,” he argued, “support the general democratic, liberal ethos of our age to be more inclusive, to grant more individual freedom, and to celebrate the common man. It’s easy to be cranky about the death of suits—and probably telling that some who worship the suit also harbor illiberal attitudes about other things—but the decline of the suit has been accompanied by the freedoms we all enjoy.”
The leveling of hierarchies and the expansion of personal freedoms that the decline of the suit signifies, more than the aesthetics of traditional menswear, underpin the “trad” right’s moaning about the way men dress today, as Guy suggests. And that might go some way towards explaining how poorly that crowd’s suits tend to fit. That said, tielessness and the shift towards business casual have been less egalitarian than they, and we, may imagine.
One place the white collars have gone open, for instance, is Goldman Sachs. In 2019, it announced to its employees in a memo that it would adopt a “firm-wide flexible dress code.” By implication, ties would obviously no longer be required, a change the firm had piloted two years earlier for its tech staffers. But the memo wasn’t especially clear on what Goldman employees should wear—there wasn’t much more to it beyond an admonition against casual dress and a recommendation that employees, whatever they wear, “dress in a manner that is consistent with [...] clients’ expectations.” Two years later, in a piece referencing Goldman’s memo, Lananh Nguyen and Melodie Jeng surveyed post-pandemic wardrobes on Wall Street for the New York Times and noted that while the casualization of office dress was continuing apace, certain subtleties of the former dress culture had endured. Historically in banking, they wrote, “strict hierarchies were embedded in unwritten fashion rules,” and “colleagues would ridicule those wearing outfits considered too flashy or too shabby for the wearer’s place in the corporate food chain… Superiors were style guides, but wearing something swankier than one’s boss was considered a faux pas.”
“These days,” they continued, “some bosses have ditched luxury timepieces in favor of Apple Watches and traded suits for short sleeves and khaki, making it tricky for subordinates to know what to wear in order to look the part.” Relevantly, the Goldman memo came straight from CEO David Solomon, who is often photographed not only tieless, but in a T-shirt—his preferred attire for the EDM sets he performs as DJ D-Sol. Like more and more executives today, he’s an easy man to outdress—perhaps dangerously so. And that’s perhaps among the reasons why white-collar workers at Goldman and elsewhere have chosen, with their putative newfound freedom, to dress as blandly as they dare.
In late 2022, the Times’s Guy Trebay filed another dispatch from Lower Manhattan’s Brookfield Place on the return-to-workwear of “the men riding the escalators down from the Royal Bank of Canada, financial services companies like American Express or the Jones Day law firm, or picking up Le District jambon baguette sandwiches to brown bag it at nearby financial behemoths like Goldman Sachs.” One Goldman employee—“David,” age 30—was functionally an avatar of the entire male workforce. “Like almost every person interviewed, or even spotted, at Brookfield Place,” Trebay wrote, “David had on a crisp white shirt with an open spread collar.” Some other “Davids” appear in an accompanying photo. There are three men on an escalator in nearly identical outfits—three grayish blue jackets (one’s a puffer), three simple white dress shirts, and no ties. Ties appear instead in another photo as “a tell for client-meeting days”—two men are in conversation, again on an escalator, in ties and plain white shirts but without jackets.
Clearly, business casual is at least partly a scam. In many spaces, the suit has been replaced with a narrow set of available uniforms only marginally less rigid than their predecessors and that consequently remain fit for presidents, prime ministers, and anyone else in the business of pretending to be normal from time to time. Again, the simple absence of a tie—the linchpin of serious menswear in the minds of most—does most of the work. As is the case in the photos above, jackets, shirts, and pants one might wear in formal business dress anyway have been retained in the new order; the subtle differences between them, like the business cards at Pierce & Pierce, are marked as matter of status competition—“many of the sneakers, shirts, watches and other more laid-back accessories spotted in Lower Manhattan,” Nguyen and Jeng observed, “cost several hundred dollars or more.”
The people who seem outwardly like they’ve opted out of this game are often the ones who’ve already won it in some sense. An affluent family, a white-collar career, and a Harvard degree made John Fetterman plausible as a political candidate and made it easier for him to dress publicly as though he had none of those things. A man with billions to his name will be taken seriously even if he wears a pair of underwear on his head. Sam Bankman-Fried knew this and appreciated too that many would actually interpret his slovenliness as a marker of his virtue and intelligence—he posed as a slob savant, simply too selfless and too busy running cost-benefit analyses through his noble, pristine mind to shower.
Strictly speaking, ties do not matter. But what should we make of the system of sartorial values that’s doing away with them? As egalitarian as it might seem, the idea at the heart of business casual is that one has to earn the right to look special—a right the powerful forfeit more and more often in the interest of obscuring or minimizing their power. And looking special, for those at the top who bother, increasingly means looking like you’ve just stumbled out of bed—a fake insouciance those working below you can’t afford to try on themselves—especially, it should be said, if they happen to be women or minorities.
Rigid dress codes of any kind are insupportable and it is, of course, possible to look lovely without a tie. But the tieless look has now been taken up as the costume of meritocracy—atop a thicket of unacknowledged inequities, we’re to define ourselves, it seems, by how narrowly useful we make ourselves. Personal style, we’re asked to believe, is an irrelevant trifle. Never mind the fact that the markers or status and standing are merely more hidden now—the important thing, it’s suggested, is that the worker who can earn and the one who can’t hack it will look, to the untrained eye, exactly the same. The worker who earns most of all will, one day, earn the privilege of looking like garbage.
It’s hardly a coincidence that we’ve inherited all this from the tech world. That industry shocked the world by doing away with ties and the strictures of business dress decades ago now. And the impulses that brought us the Jobs turtlenecks and the Zuckerberg hoodies are now being leveraged against books and the arts, which, the Valley’s finest tell us in their ramblings, ought to be pared down, made simple, sped through or, perhaps, chewed up and regurgitated by AI into a grey paste we might remold at our convenience. Taste, complexity, sublimity—a culture willing to trade its meals for a nutrient slurry has no place for these things. In time we may come to regret letting that culture so thoroughly reshape not only our dress, but our economy and society altogether.
All isn’t lost, though. In her new essay collection All Things Are Too Small, Becca Rothfeld makes a strong aesthetic and cultural case that the left should fight inequality and work to bring prosperity to all, in part because we ought to have the resources to fill out our lives with love, leisure, and more than merely useful things:
By Marx’s lights, a full-fledged person lives not only in accordance with the imperative of survival but also “in accordance with the laws of beauty.” Early capitalism and its disciplinary concomitant, the then-nascent field of political economy, understood workers not as people, with a craving for vastness, but as animals, who aspire to nothing more ornate than substance. Marx lambastes his contemporaries for truncating the worker, regarding her as “a beast reduced to the strictest bodily needs.
Marx, she notes, sounds a lot like the 18th century German Romantic playwright Friedrich Schiller here: “Utility is the great idol of the age,” he wrote, “to which all powers are in thrall and all talent must pay homage.”
Living in accordance with the “laws of beauty” sounds much better, though I really haven’t a clue what they are. As a general principle, I do believe that it's better to make considered choices about how we express and present ourselves than to surrender that agency to algorithms, or to opaque and contradictory hierarchies. So personally and specifically, I wear ties fairly often these days—not just because I like them as objects, but because they feel like a small protest against homogenization. Wearing a tie is a little stand I can take against those less interested in beautiful things than in profitable ones. Some advice, though, for those who prefer going without—try sticking with more textured and casual jackets. In the wise words of Derek Guy, “a dark business suit without a tie is like the night sky without stars.”