In April 2018, Mark Zuckerberg made a rare public appearance wearing a suit. Congress had compelled him to testify on Capitol Hill, the lawmakers curious why Facebook had been so adept at harvesting personal data and so inept at policing Russian spies. 

Zuckerberg’s suit was navy and his tie was bright blue, a shade or two lighter than Facebook’s color scheme. The New York Times called it his “I’m Sorry Suit” and, like many outlets, praised his appearance and poise. He was lauded for a “strategic” decision to make a visual statement of contrition.   

Had he? Or was he in a suit because Congress had dictated the terms for him? For one of the few times in his adult life, sweating through a barrage of government questions, Zuckerberg was not in control. And these days, when you are not in control you wear a suit.   

“They put Mark Zuckerberg in that suit,” says Deirdre Clemente, a fashion and culture historian and author of Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style, referring to Congress. “I would’ve had a lot more respect if he showed up in a hoodie: ‘This is who I am and what I do.’”

Although the suit is historically associated with projecting elegance, authority, and mastery of a profession, those qualities hearken back to the days when suits were prevalent, worn by the Atticus Finches and Don Drapers of the world. How long until we realize the suit — while still used for special occasions and by a shrinking number of traditionalists — has become associated with the opposite? The suit has become a uniform for the powerless. 

There are exceptions. Women celebrities have recently donned suits in glitter and velvet and purple, modernizing a Marlene Dietrich staple, and the suit is an important component of non-binary clothing trends. Those choices are made to subvert expectations of the suit. But most people who wear suits are men. And they wear them because they have to please someone else, whether it’s an employer or Congress. Unless you live on Park Avenue, the suit brings to mind job interviews, junior salespeople, young employees behind the counter at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, hotel clerks, and court appearances.   

When you’re in control, at least in relative control, from the C-suite down to the long rectangular table in the open-air office, you wear whatever you want, which is almost never a suit. It is the vest or bomber jacket for men, a blouse or a shell top for women. For people wealthy enough to attend wine country casual weddings, the male guests (and potentially the groom) can get by with light slacks and a button-down. At this year’s Oscars, the male celebrities who garnered the most headlines, like Chadwick Boseman, spurned suits for outfits that resembled dresses. JPMorgan lightened its dress code to business casual for most of its 237,000 employees in 2016. Goldman Sachs, the financial firm reputed to “rule the world,” nixed its suit requirement in March.

The numbers alone suggest suits lack the value and influence they once had. The Consumer Price Index for suits in June 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was about 25 percent lower than in June 2000. This descent began well before the Great Recession and during a period in which the CPI for the general apparel market has declined 4 percent and risen since the financial crisis. The CPI, which measures the price paid by consumers over time, is considered a proxy for inflation, so a CPI decline is the opposite of what would be expected in an economy with high consumer confidence.

Americans are also buying fewer suits. US revenue for men’s suits declined to $1.9 billion in 2018 from $2.2 billion in 2013, according to the research firm Euromonitor (revenue for women’s suits tumbled in the same timeframe to $402 million from $795 million). The total number of men’s suits sold in 2018 was 8.6 million — or about .07 suits per man.   

Compare this to the late 1940s. A board member of the National Clothing Manufacturers Association estimated back then that half a suit was bought per man per year, which would equal roughly 25 million suits. At the average price for a suit at the time, about $50, revenue would have been $1.25 billion. And that’s in 1940s money. Accounting for inflation, the market would have been $12.5 billion. And that’s for a United States that had half the adult male population the country has now. And — a final and — this board member suggested the industry needed to increase sales to one suit per man per year. The rate of half a suit per man, he said, “should cause us to hang our heads in shame.”  

This was when men wore suits all the time. They wore them to protest for higher wages. They wore them to watch sports. They wore them to play sports. Norman Tabler, a 74-year-old lawyer, grew up in this era, in 1950s Indiana. He dreamed of the day he could wear one.  “I yearned to be one of those guys that seemed to run the world,” Tabler says, “and they always wore suits.”

Yet even back then, the powerful had already started rebelling against the suit. Princeton students in the 1920s, according to Clemente’s book, experimented with blazers. In the 1940s, they started wearing khakis. These were the sons of America’s upper crust and they were pushing formal boundaries, especially in social settings.   

“The guys who made [the standard] are the guys who killed it,” Clemente says.

Unlike what Tabler observed in the 1950s about the powerful men around town, Gen Z and whatever we’re going to call the generation being born right now won’t see high-status workers in suits, further reducing their cachet. “We’re so far from people … who grew up with examples [at] home and on TV and in media culture where going to work meant a suit and tie,” says Lauren A. Rothman, a fashion consultant for leaders, corporations, and politicians and author of Style Bible: What to Wear to Work. 

Even at prestigious jobs, the people who wear suits can raise suspicion. Earlier this year in Dallas, attorney Christopher Kratovil was at the end of his laundry cycle and out of business casual garb. He had to make the awkward choice of wearing a suit to his corporate law firm on a day he didn’t have to appear in court. That day, one of Dykema’s partners pulled Kratovil aside and asked if he was interviewing for a new position at another firm. “She expressed genuine concern I might be thinking about or flirting with leaving,” he says. 

In certain courts in England and Canada, lawyers must wear the white wigs favored by the likes of William Penn and George Washington, but they take them off as soon as they leave the courtroom lest the public see their ridiculous appearance. Kratovil believes the day will come when American lawyers look at suits like wigs and change out of them before re-entering the outside world. He wants that day to come, too, for the good of attorneys as much as the people they encounter. “(The suit) can create a stir. ‘Why are the guys in suits here? Has something gone wrong?’” Kratovil says. 

The disappearance of the suit at the executive level has also possibly benefited women, according to Karen Pine, a fashion psychologist at Hertfordshire University in England. “In the past, women had to dress like men to reach senior positions in the workplace,” she has said. “Now they can dress as they like and assert their individuality through their work attire, without fear of bumping up against the glass ceiling.” 

Tabler, though he still wears a suit to the office (he says he’d feel naked without one), mentions that younger male lawyers have perhaps moved beyond the suit because formal attire leaves them ill-equipped to handle expanded duties in their family life. That was a problem with the power suit. Physically and symbolically, it insulated men from work around the home.

But middle-class hotel clerks, salespeople, and job candidates cannot decide to ditch their suits the way tech workers, bankers, and lawyers have. “There’s a class element to it,” Clemente says. “In order to say I don’t have to wear a suit you have to be of a certain socioeconomic class.”

At the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where Clemente is a professor, she sees at job fairs “baggy-ass black suits on skinny 19-year olds” who can’t afford anything else. “The suits are cheap; they look cheap. It’s one of these things in society, I wish we could just let it go,” she says. 

Others suggest a correction is coming and suits will return in force. For one thing, there are signs of a recession. Recessions lead to unpredictability, and people seek comfort in old traditions, even expensive, uncomfortable traditions. After the 2008 financial crisis, Zuckerberg announced a goal of wearing a tie throughout 2009.  

Rothman, who hopes the suit “doesn’t go to the mausoleum of where bad trends in life have gone,” has recently seen more upscale clients replacing casual dress with suits made of linen or paired with non-traditional colors.

To her, there was no more visible an instance of the power of a suit than the July Democratic presidential debates. She described the 20-plus Democratic hopefuls as the best-dressed group of candidates she had seen. “You’re not coming away wanting to make fun of Hillary’s suits or Bernie’s oversized jackets,” Rothman says. 

Except these politicians weren’t in their usual positions of power. On national TV, trying to answer questions from CNN personalities in tidy soundbites, what were they doing but interviewing for a job? 

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It is summertime (thankfully). And given the advent of warm weather and the sudden desire to drink at outdoor bars that get to be called beer gardens because they feature a few potted plants, it is also gingham time. Time to wear gingham, and time to share opinions about it.

Cosmopolitan noted in March “anything’s better in gingham print,” while the New York Times recently announced “Goodbye, Gingham” (welcoming, instead, high-necked billowy fabrics). Of course, this was a few weeks after the Times’s T Magazine recommended an “elegant and playfully nostalgic” gingham handbag. Last spring, the Wall Street Journal featured an article titled “Stop Dressing Like Every Other Guy: Give Up Your Gingham Shirts.” Two months later, the Journal went further: “Over Gingham Shirts? This Summer Try Tie-Dye.” By the end of summer, it had changed its tone, endorsing “Gingham’s New Chic.”   

It was all very gingham. The fabric can come off as fashionable yet basic, noticeable yet predictable. It symbolizes a working-class past yet transcends it, making gingham a choice for models and celebrities as much as immigrant strivers. Summer picnic tables are adorned in red gingham, and every man in America is adorned in blue, courtesy of that oft-ridiculed J.Crew shirt. In recent years, each passing summer has brought new and resurrected gingham styles (gingham Nike Cortez, gingham swimsuits, gingham Katy Perry robot) and numerous takes celebrating or eulogizing the look.  

But there is a reason we are living in this gingham era. With oceans, economic inequality, and political division rising, familiarity and simplicity feel pretty good. “If stability started to reign, whether in politics or economics, maybe a bolder pattern that shows imbalance or discord would take hold,” says pattern artist Michelle Grabner, who routinely features gingham in her exhibitions. “We have to be aware of the context we’re living in. These last two years, blue gingham makes so much sense to me.”   

A brief history of gingham

Gingham was first made in Asia, possibly in Malaysia; the Malay word genggang provides the root for the English gingham. It was popularized by the Dutch and English in the 18th century. The pattern is repeating checks, typically a crisp white contrasted with a bright color that pops. Gingham is geometry, mathematically predictable; it has the same look from every side. That predictability differs from plaid, which Jude Stewart, the author of the book Patternalia, says is too variable to produce the iconic, eye-catching look that gingham does.  

It’s also hard to screw up. Gingham goes with other patterns and many colors and requires minimal maintenance for any body type. “There’s something about how it shapes the body,” says Eva Franco, who has used gingham on strapless dresses and mixed it with polka dots for her eponymous Los Angeles clothing line. “It’s like a nice frame. A flower print would be more decorative. [Gingham] feels like an envelope and it just encompasses you. It makes you look together.”

Yes, gingham does the hard work for us.

The United States had gingham by the 19th century. It was the durable choice for men and women of the plains. It really took off as a domestic fabric in 1916 when a Kansas City designer named Nelly Don, “the grand lady of the garment industry,” created a pink gingham housedress. She sold 216 dresses at $1 apiece in one day, and the dress became a phenomenon. Before, women mostly spent long hours sewing their own clothes, or bought ugly “Mother Hubbard” dresses to wear around the house. 

Judy Garland then wore a light blue gingham dress in The Wizard of Oz in 1939, pairing the look with a wicker picnic basket and an unrelenting desire to return home. Hollywood good girl Doris Day wore gingham in the 1940s. In 1959, actress Brigitte Bardot got married in gingham. These popular, wholesome portrayals happen to skew overwhelmingly wealthy and white. 

But gingham has also been associated with striving and equality and a subtle hint of subversion that hides amid the predictability. Nelly Don’s gingham housedress, according to a study by Centenary College professor Mikyoung Whang and Kansas State professor Sherry Haar, allowed women to look good, freed them from long hours spent sewing, and signified their introduction into consumer culture, fitting as a piece of the progressive “New Woman” movement of the early 20th century.

At a glance, Day may have looked like the girl next door in gingham, but, as A.O. Scott wrote, her legacy lives on as a sex goddess whose presence “simultaneously upholds the pretense of virtuous normality and utterly transgresses it.” Bardot was reimagining the traditional wedding and the traditional limits of gingham. The provocative 1997 Comme des Garçons collection used gingham “lumps and bumps” on bellies, shoulders, and hips to question societal assumptions about female beauty.

Gingham’s relationship with class and personality is more mobile than that of, say, houndstooth and seersucker. They both began as a working-class looks but morphed into suit patterns for the aristocracy. One of the best-known traditions related to seersucker is “Seersucker Thursday.” That’s when US senators, disapproved of by at least 69 percent of the American public for the past decade, wear seersucker suits on Capitol Hill.   

In the latter half of the 20th century, gingham hung on in large part because of a tote bag designed by the inexpensive brand Tati. As Stewart explains in Patternalia, these bags, “totes Barbes,” were immensely popular among African immigrants living in France, who helped spread the trend worldwide and inspired high-fashion designers like Louis Vuitton. 

The low-high class movement gets complicated by the French word for gingham: vichy. The French call it that because the fabric was prominently manufactured in Vichy, France. That name doesn’t exactly convey egalitarianism, considering Vichy was the capital for the provisional French government that sided with the Nazis in World War II.       

The gingham “safety net”

This recent gingham boom started in about 2009, during the Great Recession. High-fashion designers, such as Balenciaga, Paskal, Christopher Kane, and Oscar de la Renta, have featured gingham in their collections. Taylor Swift has walked the streets of Nashville in it. Dua Lipa posed in mint green gingham in Las Vegas. Rihanna wowed in a light pink gingham pantsuit. Mindy Kaling reinvents gingham chic all the dang time.      

The runways and celebrities have elevated gingham beyond totes Barbes and J.Crew. This has also maybe set gingham on fashion’s cruel filtering cycle. As Meryl Streep’s version of Anna Wintour explains in The Devil Wears Prada — in the quiet, authoritative way only Meryl Streep can — all trends eventually end up at department stores and then clearance racks, possibly in the form of a lumpy sweater. And for the past year or so, gingham has been as likely to appear at Target as on the runway. In April 2018, Bloomberg highlighted data from the trend forecasting firm WGSN that showed new gingham items on store shelves had doubled from the previous year, suggesting the fabric was peaking and would soon be on its way out.  

At J.Crew, it’s only getting harder to buy that gingham shirt. For at least the past few weeks, the blue “Secret Wash shirt in faded gingham” has been unavailable online. The product listing features the note, “We’re sorry. This item has been so popular, it has sold out.” Last year, the brand closed 34 stores and has plans to close 20 this year (a J.Crew spokesperson did not respond to an interview request). 

But the potential for gingham fatigue or its disappearance ignores its staying power and, perhaps, the world’s inability to not scare the hell out of us. Gingham’s prevalence provides what Grabner, the pattern artist, calls a “psychological safety net.” And it has been appearing as a trend often when America needs it the most. In 1929, the New York Times announced “gingham is being revived” just in time for the stock market crash. It made a similar proclamation in 1946, as we recovered from World War II; in 1968, amid Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy; in 1991, as we got used to a new world order without the Soviet Union; and 2009, around the time Americans stopped believing in continued prosperity. 

Grabner regularly wears a pair of red gingham Vans, but only at home. She doesn’t want it to be a part of her identity, like Beuys’s hat or Chihuly’s eyepatch. But she still enjoys seeing it on everyone else. 

“My husband,” Grabner says, “wears a light blue gingham shirt when we go out.”   

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