Standards of men’s dress in America are in a bad state, and the brown suit is just the thing to revive them.
It won’t be easy, though. In order to win broad acceptance, brown suits must overcome longstanding prejudices against them that have persisted throughout several revolutions in men’s style. A blazer-with-tie-and-khaki-pants is now seen as more appropriate than a brown suit in many professional settings. This would not be the case in a just world.
Brown has a spectrum as wide as gray’s and wider than blue’s. Pale blue, because of its association with 1970s proms in the New Jersey suburbs, will always hold a highly limited appeal for suits; tan, though, strikes the perfect balance between lightness and seriousness that one wants in a summer suit. Taupe, the prince of earth tones, is marvelous in the winter. Changing his wardrobe with the seasons is the first step a man should take in his ascent from schlubville, and brown has more potential on that score than gray and blue and, obviously, black.
In settling on appropriate standards of dress, each generation must reconcile the competing goods of comfort and elegance. At present, the pendulum has drifted far too far towards comfort. We need more structure and suavity in day-to-day menswear, and soon. More brown suits might promote formality because maybe more men would up their game if they felt like they had more options.
It is not a coincidence that with less formality, over time, has come more conformity: Bow ties, double-breasted and three-piece suits, pocket squares, fedoras—these once passed without notice. Now, however, they make many men feel self-conscious. On purely aesthetic grounds, there is nothing wrong with charcoal gray and navy blue, the standard palette of the vanishing race of male professionals who wear suits to work. But perhaps one reason why so many men stifle their inner peacock is because they feel uninspired by the choice between charcoal gray and navy blue.
The decline of the suit is reaching crisis proportions now that the baby boomers are beginning to retire. Most men over 60 in T-shirts and jeans look like old hippies. We need to quickly reverse course and reintegrate collared shirts, ties, and jackets into modes of work and play.
The main problem with “business casual”—and all informal dress, really—is that it’s unbecoming unless you are an Adonis. Spectacularly handsome men look spectacularly handsome in a blue oxford and khakis, or T-shirts and flip-flops, but the rest of us benefit from a bit more effort. Just because Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire after dropping out of college does not mean that you should, too. One could even argue that business casual widens nature’s unequal distribution of physical beauty and is, therefore, undemocratic. More formal standards of dress give ordinary guys more of a fair shake in their romantic and professional pursuits.
Were the brown suit to revive men’s style, this would not be tantamount to a revival of the brown suit itself because it has never truly had a golden age. It has never been accepted, and for two reasons that were once convincing but now are moot.
First, many 20th-century critics of men’s dress believed that the main problem with modern men’s style was a lack of color. (See, for example, Pearl Binder’s 1958 polemic The Peacock’s Tail.) From a number of perspectives, it is certainly interesting to ponder why American men cut such a drab figure in contrast to the splendidness found throughout history, and among so many other males in the animal kingdom. But if Brooks Brothers started stocking emerald green suits, no one would buy them. (Certain shades of green can work in slacks or odd jackets but it’s generally inadvisable in the case of suits.) A return to the high-heeled buckled shoes, laces, bows, and wild colors of monarchical times is totally impractical.
That said, with respect to shirts and ties, brown might slightly broaden the color spectrum for men. Most bold ties, such as the aggressively monotone varieties favored by President Trump, look better set against the backdrop of a brown suit than a black one. Light yellow shirts, maybe paired with a tartan tie, look smart with darker shades of brown. Gold and rust work well with brown because they carry its undertones. Nothing will set off your favorite pair of gold cufflinks like a dark brown suit and white shirt. Or how about tan gabardine—”summer’s most luxurious suit,” according to the style sage Alan Flusser—married to a light pink shirt and navy blue (or black) club tie? Shades of light brown with black make a sharp combination. A gentle windowpane pattern on a brown suit is a nice touch, just as on a gray one—though be careful with bold stripes, which are too much, too soon.
The second reason is that in England, the source of virtually all American men’s style, there was for a long time a rule called “no brown in town.” Its premise was that country and urban living mutually benefited from different modes of dress. Accordingly, wearing a brown suit was associated with being a bit of a yokel, and someone who tried to push for broader acceptance of the brown suit would have been accused of lowering standards. But Michael Anton, in The Suit (2006), reports that the British clothing industry dropped “no brown in town” many years ago; and in America, for better or worse, the importation of country, or even outdoor-wear, into streetwear is a fait accompli.
Ronald Reagan was a strong proponent of the brown suit. Reagan wore brown like other men wore gray. His arsenal had great range, which gave him brown options for all manner of occasions: the campaign trail, signing ceremonies, weighty Situation Room meetings, the lighting of the National Christmas Tree, knocking off at his ranch in California, meeting with Michael Jackson and Mother Teresa (not at the same time), and when negotiating an end to the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev.
How did he get away with it? Certainly, Reagan benefited from former generations’ greater tolerance for diversity in professional male attire. But, also, all his suits, from tuxedos on down, had the same cut (i. e., the shape of the shoulders, how the suit hangs from your frame). When he modulated from charcoal gray to chocolate, it didn’t look like a whim—which is something we don’t want to see in powerful politicians.
Reagan’s sartorial diversity-within-consistency should stand as a lesson for all of us—as should, it goes without saying, the confidence he exuded in his personal sense of style. But Reagan was not the most famous case of a president wearing brown: For his first inauguration, George Washington eschewed military dress and selected an American manufacturer, the Hartford Woolen Manufactory, to make the brown coat and breeches he wore. Along with this proud association with republican simplicity, brown is a very masculine color. It evokes cigars and whiskey. Men look better in brown than women, though we should assume that were it to catch on, women would appropriate brown for professional uses just as they have gray, blue, and black.
However, we can’t expect politicians to take the lead, as was made clear by Barack Obama’s ill-fated encounter with a tan suit in the summer of 2014. Despite how everyone had raved for years about how cool President Obama was, and the still more intense popular adulation for his wife Michelle’s fashion tastes, his choice was second-guessed. So Obama beat a rapid retreat back to blue and gray.
His failure was due, in part, to his not having prepared the public for such a dramatic departure. Obama prided himself in being a “no drama” dresser: While president, he deliberately limited his wardrobe in order to cut down on the number of choices he had to make every day. Another reason why politicians are so conformist in their clothes is because they sense that striking out with two-tone shoes or a flower in their buttonhole would suggest that their minds are distracted by matters other than their constituents’ well-being.
Nor can dandies take the lead, because the dandy does not really exist in modern American society. Dandies thrived in the 19th century, a sweet spot in history when aristocratic taste coincided with a radical openness towards changes in mores wrought by a series of political revolutions. Modern American society is not lacking for wealthy young men devoted to lives of pleasure, but they prefer to dress as if they’re poor. One does sometimes see one of our few dandies wearing brown, but the effect is counterproductive. Again, we’re trying to think seriously here about how to secure a beachhead for brown, and most men don’t trust dandies.
Our only hope is for the tech industry to take the lead. True, tech has been the driving force behind business casual: When JPMorgan recently authorized “business casual” for regular workdays—a memo that sent shivers down Madison Avenue—a central motivation was to attract more recruits and clients from the tech industry. Apparently, the belief is pervasive throughout Silicon Valley that serious men don’t care about clothes, but this is plainly false. The New York Times Style section has reported that many techies like to cut loose by wearing ornate socks. They’re plainly not indifferent to elegance.
Indeed, the tech industry’s success has as much to do with people like Steve Jobs’s exacting aesthetic standards as anything to do with engineering. “Sleek” is, admittedly, not the first word that comes to mind when we think about the brown suit’s virtues, but you do have the California connection. The Westernness of brown was surely one of its main attractions for Ronald Reagan. Tech titans who want to be sure they’re never mistaken for members of the hidebound East Coast elite should go with brown precisely because brown has never been fashionable inside the Beltway, or on Wall Street, or among WASPs in general.
The fashion historian James Laver once argued that revolutions in modes of dress need 10 years to fully take effect. If we start now, we could expect the brown suit to have become a menswear staple by, say, 2027—in time for the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. There’s no time to waste.
Stephen Eide is a New York-based public policy researcher.
