The Godfather: Peter Corris on suits
I know of few more ludicrous sights than a clutch of AFL football commentators, mostly solidly built ex-players, lined up on a football ground at half time and all wearing grey suits, white shirts and ties. Some discussion programs, such as Foxtel’s League Teams, dresses the panel the same way. It puzzles me why people involved in discussing a recreational activity are obliged to dress as though going to a funeral or a wedding.
Mercifully, this isn’t universal. Some of the on-ground commentators, like ex-Geelong midfielder Cameron Ling, though still in a suit, wear an open-necked shirt. At one time some of the AFL coaches – for example, Denis Pagan and Rodney Eade – wore suits to the game. Nothing could be better calculated to emphasise the distance between player and coach but now this concept seems to have been grasped and most coaches appear wearing the club insignia on their polo shirts and zip-up jackets.
The most intelligent discussion of the game takes place in the On the Couch program on Monday nights. Open-necked shirts and even shirtsleeves are de rigeur. I recall when the egregious John Elliott, ex-chairman of the Carlton club and once touted as a possible future Liberal Prime Minister, now a much diminished figure, once criticised the panellists of On the Couch for not wearing what he termed ‘a coat’.
The male lounge suit, now an intensely conservative garment, was not always that. Following the somewhat androgynous and gaudy fashions of the Regency period, male dress among the upper and middle classes began to become more sombre. The tightly buttoned knee-length frock coat gave way to the cutaway morning coat as formal dress. The unadorned lounge suit evolved as appropriate casual clothing for the country or the beach, incredibly restrictive though that seems today. Eventually it came to be ordinary day dress, leaving the morning coat and dinner suit as the last symbols of formality.
There has been change in the right direction – the hat has gone, apart from when used as protection against the sun, and the waistcoat has mostly been abandoned despite lamentable attempts to revive it. But the suit endures. I find it difficult to understand why the lounge suit won such universal acceptance, being adopted by societies such as the Russians, Chinese and Indians, who once had much more interesting costumes. The Arabs, to their credit, hold out against this homogeneity.
The lounge suit can be cut for comfort, though certain versions of it – the heavily shoulder-padded, bulky double-breasted version, the three-piece suit and the atrocious ‘bum-freezer’ (see any Bobby Rydell video clip) were notably not comfortable. The accompanying shirt buttoned up to the neck and the length of cloth knotted under the collar are constricting absurdities.
I once heard a female friend say, ‘I like a man in a suit’, but I doubt that this is why men accept the boring standardisation of their dress. I suspect a latent fear of being thought effeminate deters display and lies behind men’s preparedness to dress much of the time as though about to bury their mothers.
Apart from changes in fashion and society’s increasing open-mindedness to clothing (we’ve come a long way since Jean Shrimpton’s mini skirt) I think the advent of air-conditioning liberated us, particularly in what we wear to the office. Year-round ambient temps helped evolve lighter brighter office wear, even in uniforms like the tailored business suit, but fresh air warrants a more casual approach.