I have been shopping for a suit for my cousin's wedding-cum-big family reunion type thing in a couple of weeks. The whole experience combines several little things I find unpleasant into one big, fat, generally unpleasant experience, but the two main ones are: mall shopping and wearing suits.  The last time I wore one was to my father's funeral five years ago.  The time before that? A disaster: my interview with the South Korean Ambassador to Hungary (I wrote about it here).

I may or may not have had a need for one since.  I wouldn't know, really.  I tend to find a way out of wearing suits, it's so awful.  I'd almost rather be dipped in honey and thrown to the lesbians.  It's a toss-up.  The thing of it is, there's nothing worse on a man (aside from chinstraps, excessively manscaped eyebrows, and spiderweb elbow tattoos) than a cheap suit.  Of course, a big part of the problem is: hardly anything looks better on a man than an expensive one.

A cheap suit is the capitalist equivalent of a hairshirt.  You might as well be wearing a sandwich board proclaiming: I HAVE NO MONEY AND NO TASTE.  And what's the point of that?  Why even get dressed and leave the house at all?

I thought about going the blazer route — no one would care, though somewhere deep in their consciousness, on the border of subconsciousness there'd be that, "hmm, he's one of those... blazer types," and a corduroy blazer type at that. 

No, there's nothing like showing up in a smart suit.  It's a matter of pride.

And the truth is, people notice.  And assume.  The trick, with people you don't see but once in a blue moon, is to show up impeccably groomed and well-dressed, and buy a round or two like it's no big deal.  People will assume it's your normal, never suspecting you'll have to starve yourself and forgo vacations for the next six months. Even if you told them, which you wouldn't of course, they'd think it was hyperbole. 

"Clothes make the man," as Mark Twain once remarked.  "Naked people have little or no influence on society".  Think of poor Rastignac's desperation to marry up in Balzac's Le Père Goriot.  His first stop?  The tailor.

He had seen at once how great a part the tailor plays in a young man's career; a tailor is either a deadly enemy or a staunch friend, with an invoice for a bond of friendship; between these two extremes there is,alack! no middle term. In this representative of his craft Eugene discovered a man who understood that his was a sort of paternal function for young men at their entrance into life, who regarded himself as a stepping-stone between a young man's present and future.And Rastignac in gratitude made the man's fortune by an epigram of a kind in which he excelled at a later period of his life.

"I have twice known a pair of trousers turned out by him make a match of twenty thousand livres a year!"

The novel, like so many 19th Century novels, is as much about dressing up as it is about marrying up. 

Of course, I'm in a different phase of life than young Rastignac.  But dressing well on occasions that call for it is just as important.  The suit conveys the message precisely.  It is, as John Berger, in his classic essay "The Suit and The Photograph", says: " The suit, as we know it today,... was the first ruling class costume to idealize purely sedentary power."  Mmm, now that's my kind of power.

But it might be more apt to consider Berger's taking-off point: the famous 1914 photograph by August Sanders of three peasants suited up on their way to a dance...


"Block out the faces," he instructs, "and consider only their clothed bodies."

By no stretch of the imagination can you believe that these bodies belong to the middle or ruling class. They might belong to workers, rather than peasants; but otherwise there is no doubt. Nor is the clue their hands- as it would be if you could touch them. Then why is their class so apparent?

Is it a question of fashion and the quality of the cloth of their suits? In real life such details would be telling. In a small black and white photograph they are not very evident. Yet the static photograph shows, perhaps more vividly than in life, the fundamental reason why the suits, far from disguising the social class of those who wore them, underlined and emphasized it.

Their suits deform them. Wearing them, they look as though they were physically misshapen. A past style in clothes often looks absurd until it is re-incorporated into fashion. Indeed the economic logic of fashion depends on making the old-fashioned look absurd. But here we are not faced primarily with that kind of absurdity; here the clothes look less absurd, less “abnormal” than the men’s bodies which are in them.

The point is to get them out of the suits, obviously, right?  But where I see a hot three-way, Berger sees a classic case of class hegemony. 

I must admit Berger's commentary gives voice to my darkest fear:  that I'll drop seven hundred bucks on a suit (which is plenty expensive enough for my purposes) only to come out looking deformed and abnormal. 

Truth is, if I'm going to look deformed and abnormal anyway, I'd rather spend a hundred bucks to do it, and spend the rest on a prostitute for later.  And with that in mind, I'll admit I have tried on a $99 suit or two over the past few days.  The results were so grotesque I could only carry it off as Borat.

But then, along came these Banana Republic ads. I have to tell you, I'm an utter tool, if you didn't already know it.  All it took was Chris Messina in their fall line, and I was like: "I'll take two."


The line is supposedly inspired by the French New Wave, which I'm down with, but since we no longer accessorize with cigarettes, something is missing.  Still, it's a smart suit.  It's possible I won't even need the prostitute now.