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Comment by dqpb | Hacker News Reader

Arguably, suit and ties aren't clothes, they're costumes. They were bound to phase out eventually.

Yep. Suits, Patagucci vests, jeans+hoodie, etc. Its all costumes used to signal tribe membership.

I spent most of last week in all-day meetings with executives, senior consultants, and engineering managers. Each group dressed distinctively. It’s been 3 years since I attended such meetings in person and I’d forgotten…

Execs - suits with open collar/no tie, dress watches (Tag, Rolex, etc)

Consultants - slacks and jacket. Casual shoes (but not sneakers). Apple Watches.

Engineering - jeans and sneakers. Apple Watches.

Not hard and fast rules, but definitely a pattern.

There's something to be said for wearing suit and tie. It's a handy way to look "smartly/fashionably dressed" in a general context, that you have to put literally zero effort in thinking about. It's also, to some extent, an overt signal that you're committing to being professional and considerate of others - an often dismissed 'bourgeois' norm that's nevertheless a building block of society, if perhaps one that most people like to take for granted.

A suit is a signal of being considerate of others? Since when?

Since the suit became popular as informal clothing in the Western world, starting from the mid-19th to the mid-20th c. Look at old photos from that era and you'll see pretty much everyone wears suit-style clothes in public, even and perhaps especially folks we would consider "lower class" today. There was a reason for that, and it had a lot to do with signaling respect and being considerate to others.

Oh come on, there’s a leap of logic if I ever saw one

It's signalling class, not respect. People can be assholes in any clothes. It's a tool for getting a certain type of person to respect you.

It was not signaling class historically. There's plenty of old photos showing lower-class folks who did wear suit-style clothes, and took pride in what that meant to them. It only devolved into signaling class when basic norms of mutual respect began to be widely connoted as a "middle-class/bourgeois" thing, which started in the mid-20th c. in much of the West and continued to the present day.

Yes, because there are often incentives for lower-class people to signal higher class. That doesn't mean it's not signaling.

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