I’m standing in front of three mirrors , each about eight foot tall and arranged in a concave shape, so I’m confronted by three replicas of my stiff, apprehensive body at once. A man wearing a beautiful grey pinstripe suit pinches and adjusts the navy two-piece suit that I’m wearing. As he goes, he calls out the names of various measurements — point to point, cross back, half waist, fork, rise — and each one is followed by a number that’s recorded on a clipboard by his assistant.
I don’t know what these names and numbers mean but they reassure me, the same way the shipping forecast reassures insomniacs and early risers. I’m into clothes. I probably spend too much money on them.
I can give you an elaborate explanation, name-dropping Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, about why it’s okay to pay the best part of £50 for a Supreme t-shirt. But it’s taken me until the grand old age of 27 to buy a decent, made-to-measure suit. Why? Because I’m attending my first wedding as an adult this year.
It’s not as if I ever have to wear a suit for work. Hardly anyone does these days. Just 7 per cent of workers, in fact, say they wear “business attire” on the job, according to a YouGov survey from last September.
That proportion only goes up to 13 per cent even among the highest-earning managerial professions. The gradual erosion of dress codes over the past decade was turbo-charged by the pandemic, when white-collar workers realised they quite liked doing Zoom calls.