Dress Codes and Their Discontents

Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of an essay that appears in the current issue of National Review.

In September, there was a contretemps in the U.S. Senate: Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, relaxed the dress code (unwritten). No more would men be required to wear a coat and tie on the Senate floor. This was a favor to John Fetterman, the new senator from Pennsylvania, who favors shorts and a hoodie. Schumer was cutting Fetterman some slack: no slacks.

Against the new latitude, there was a backlash. “Decorum!” people cried. Among the criers were some of the least decorous people in the country. They did not really care about a coat and tie; they didn’t like Fetterman (or Schumer). If Fetterman were a senator they liked, they would have hailed him as a Man of the People stickin’ it to the fancy-pants elite. Be that as it may . . .

Two senators — Manchin of West Virginia and Romney of Utah — got together and proposed codifying the unwritten rule. “Business attire,” their resolution said. It passed unanimously. And what is “business attire”? The resolution was specific about men: a coat and tie — and long pants, just to be clear. About women, the resolution was silent. (That was probably wise, on the part of the resolution-proposers.)

The headline in the New York Times read as follows: “In a Sartorial About-Face, Senate Reverts to Tradition on Its Dress Code.” Under the byline — that of Robert Jimison — were these words: “Reporting from the Capitol in a woven silk navy polka dotted tie.”

I’m sure, or pretty sure, that a dress code is right for the Senate floor. I must say, however, that I often chafe at a dress code — at a coat and tie (sometimes literally). Like many people, I have a traditionalist side and an individualist side. The latter side says, “Don’t tread on me. Don’t tell me what to wear. Don’t make me dress up.”

I think of William F. Buckley Jr., “patron saint of the conservatives” (to quote the subtitle of a book about him). Talking to Time magazine in 1967, he said, “I feel I qualify spiritually and philosophically as a conservative, but temperamentally I am not of the breed.” He sure wasn’t. Back to him in due course (as he himself would say).

Formal or decorous attire is usually associated with conservatism — but I have a memory of Eugene D. Genovese, the late historian. As a young man in New York, he belonged to the Communist Party. It was “a very puritanical party,” he told me. “If we had gone to a meeting not properly dressed, we would have heard about it later.”

There is a place for uniformity, I think we can all agree. I love seeing children in school uniforms. It makes my heart beat a little. Those uniforms speak of order, civilization, and learning. (Mind you, I never had to wear a school uniform. If I had, I might think differently. My feelings might be less romantic.)

In 1984, Caspar Weinberger, the defense secretary, flew to England to participate in an Oxford Union debate. (Bear with me.) His opponent was E. P. Thompson, the famed Marxist historian. They debated the following proposition: “There is no moral difference between the foreign policies of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.” (Guess which side each man was on.)

Weinberger showed up in black tie — because he had been told that this was the tradition. Thompson was dressed less formally, and gibed at Weinberger about his attire. Weinberger responded, “My father always said that a tuxedo was the most democratic of costumes — because, when they wear a tuxedo, people all look the same.”

Another memory from the 1980s: Tip O’Neill, the speaker of the House, never attended the Gridiron Dinner — which is a big and festive annual affair in Washington. White tie is required. O’Neill said that his working-class constituents back in Cambridge, Mass., would never understand how he could don such a get-up.

Maybe Tip just didn’t want to go?

Over the years, I have sometimes been invited to have a drink at the Metropolitan Opera Club during intermission. Black tie is required (and white tie on other nights). Members are known as “the Penguins.” I have appreciated the invitations but made my excuses.

Sometimes, as I see it, a dress code is “a ass.” In 1961, Rudolf Nureyev had just defected. The mother of a friend of mine was serving as his publicist, I believe. Publicist or agent. They were to have lunch together at a London club.

Nureyev was denied entry — because he was not wearing a coat and tie. Instead, the great dancer was wearing one of those tunics he favored. A shimmering blue number. He was probably the most elegantly dressed man in the city. But he was not wearing a tie, or a jacket, and rules are rules . . .

Think of the men having their lunch in that club that day. Did any look half as good as Nureyev? Which leads me to a point, and a rude one, and a good one.

Slim men look great in suits. (I wish I were a slimster.) A suit is a vertical number — it drapes. It goes up and down: whoosh. It is not meant to bulge out. The tie is meant to go north and south, in a straight line, not meander upward and outward.

Heavy men look wrong in a suit, and worse in a tuxedo. They look better in an Indian kurta pajama or one of those flowing, capacious robes from the Persian Gulf. Those corpulent Bahraini sheikhs — they look okay in those robes, and comfortable, too.

Talk of India and the Gulf reminds me of the heat. People tend to run hot or cold — they tend to feel too hot or too cold. Let me continue in frank speaking.

Older people tend to run cold. When I was young, I worked at a golf course (two, actually, but I’m thinking of one). Older men on staff — men retired from their career jobs — worked the Sunday-morning shift. When we young guys came in for the afternoon shift, the clubhouse would be stifling. All the windows would be shut tight. The older guys would be in sweaters. We’d throw open the windows, laughing.

Women tend to run cold. (True?) In March of last year, the Senate Judiciary Committee held its confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom President Biden had nominated for the Supreme Court. Senator Marsha Blackburn asked her, “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” The nominee was cagey. This became a subject of controversy and hilarity for days.

Saturday Night Live did a sketch, with Cecily Strong playing Senator Blackburn. Talking about women, the Blackburn character said, “You know: They’re always cold, they’re the ones that be shoppin’ . . .”

I myself run hot, I’m sorry to say. If I’m asked to wear a coat and tie in the summer, I turn into a rebel, or at least a complainer.

Now and then, I’m invited to join someone for a meal in a club — a club that requires a coat and tie (as I suppose they all do). I’m apt to think, “There are 25,000 restaurants in New York City.” (That’s a fact, not an exaggeration.) “Can’t we eat in one of them?”

I had a dear old friend who liked to meet at a certain club. She was a stylish and wonderful lady, and I would have done anything for her. But I complained — entertainingly, I hope.

“It’s 87 degrees outside, with high humidity. You have made me put on long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a jacket. Plus the tie! What kind of friend are you? And there you are, in a lovely lightweight dress, with no sleeves. Cool as a cucumber. You are appropriately dressed. I’m sweatin’ like a sow in this parka you’ve made me put on.”

“Oh, Jay,” she would say.

But seriously: Isn’t it perverse to wear warm clothing — layers of clothing — in hot and humid weather? Even if we refrigerate our rooms? Even if men resort to seersucker? Shouldn’t you put on a jacket when you’re cold, and not otherwise? Tradition, or propriety, overrules common sense, sometimes.

Hasidic men dress in very heavy clothing (black, too). I don’t know how the poor guys can stand it. A colleague of mine once remarked, “This garb was designed for the Polish winter in the 18th century, and here they are wearing it in Brooklyn, all summer.”

For the past 20 years, I have worked at the Salzburg Festival in August. The concert halls there are very, very hot. The Grosser Saal (or “Great Hall”) of the Mozarteum, I nicknamed the “Grosser Sauna.” The Austrians like their halls that way. From what I understand, it has to do with health beliefs. (Cool or circulating air is bad for you. You might catch a cold.)

People dress up, however. At the first concert I ever attended in Salzburg — it was in the Grosses Festspielhaus — I quickly took off my jacket. The man next to me leaned over and said, “Every man in this house would like to do what you just did.” Well, why didn’t they? Tradition and propriety. I’m an American — which means I can get away with all sorts of stuff when I’m abroad. The Americans don’t know any better, people think, and they’re a little nuts anyway.

At subsequent concerts in Salzburg, I began to notice something. It was amusing. I’d take off my jacket. And men around me would look at their wives as if to say, “Well, he’s done it. May I?” The wives would sort of shrug or nod, and the men would take off their jackets. But I had to break the ice, so to speak.

No respectable opera production in Salzburg would be without nudity. So my line has always been, “Salzburg: a place where the people in the audience are overdressed and the people onstage are underdressed.”

Here in the U.S. of A., concertgoers are dressing less formally than they once did — to the chagrin of many. Our society has slobbified, they say (with justice). A friend of mine stopped going to the Met, I believe, because the people around her dressed so poorly. She felt it showed a “lack of respect.” I do understand her. She is an Austrian (as it happens) — elegant and aristocratic — and used to a certain standard.

While concertgoers have dressed less formally, so have musicians themselves: violinists, pianists, and so forth. They wear these black pajamas, a uniform that resembles a Mao suit. “Proletarian chic,” I sometimes say.

Yuja Wang, the Chinese pianist, is a different story. She dresses like a stripper — unapologetically. She says she plans to keep on doing it until she is no longer “hot.” (Not in the sense of temperature.) Once, she wore an outfit that was racy for anyone else but tame for her. “She might as well have been wearing a burqa,” I wrote.

(I adore this young woman, let me make clear. I’m not knocking her. Simply noting.)

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, both, dresses colorfully and individualistically. The other night, he led a chamber ensemble composed of Met players. The woman behind me said to her friend, “He’s wearing a purple T-shirt.” The other woman said, “He looks like he just came from the gym.” The first woman said, “Yeah, but I bet that T-shirt cost more than my whole closet.”

Back to Bill Buckley — who was both formal and not. Both a traditionalist and an individualist. His wife, Pat, was famed for her sense of style. For almost 20 years, she was chairman of the Met Gala, New York’s biggest fashion event. She regarded Bill as louche. “I used to send him out nice,” she once said, “but then I gave up.”

To be sure, WFB required, or expected, a coat and tie at his dinners. At an editorial dinner one night, a young staffer — new — showed up in a dress shirt, but not a tie or coat. Bill asked me, “Who is that person who is undressed?”

Bill himself swore by a blue blazer (a “blazuh,” he would say). He would not get on a plane without one. He could be wearing a grimy shirt and grimy shorts — plus a grimy sailor’s cap. But, before stepping on a plane, he would put a blue blazer over his shirt. There was always something of the prep-school kid about him — combined with the rebel. The prep-school kid who got into trouble.

I could go on with stories and opinions, but you have heard enough. To say once again: I think that shorts and hoodies would be weird on the Senate floor. “I hate society / I hate propriety,” goes an old song (from a Victor Herbert operetta). I hate neither. But I’m getting crankier about dress codes, among other things, and I mainly think people ought to behave better, however they dress.