Wearing a business suit without a tie is trendy nowadays. Like most other sartorial practices that are trendy nowadays, it is strikingly unattractive. A man wearing a business suit without a tie looks like he has just been released from jail after having been hauled in with a snoot-full the night before and divested of his tie in order that he not hang himself–unless he buttons his top button, in which case he resembles an Iranian politician. Not surprisingly, the tie-less look is often favored by the same men who don’t realize that gray stubble doesn’t make a man look sexy, sporty, and simpatico, but rather like a homeless inebriate.

With each of these two practices, the men in question are telling us something: The gray-stubble cohort is unwittingly telling us that they are mistaken about what chicks dig. The suit-with-no-tie brigade is telling us that men want clothing that enables them to be somewhat dressed up but still comfortable, using pieces other than going tieless with traditional sport coat and slacks. They want to respect their surroundings and the occasion, in an increasingly casual society, without feeling physically restricted.

We have been here before.

The leisure suit, popular with fashion victims for about half a dozen years in the 1970s and with the severely afflicted until friction-pilled polyester became a fire risk, is one of the most maligned fashion phenomena of all time. It is the Edsel of the garment industry.

This writer remembers it with horror, particularly because the assistant principal of his middle school–a truly wonderful man–draped his paunchy but otherwise angular ex-basketball-player frame in an ensemble........

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