I grew up in your basic lower middle class neighborhood. We didn't have much, but neither did most of my friends. We played baseball, read Mad Magazine, and dreamed about the fast cars we saw every day. We didn't have nice clothes, but it didn't matter. Until early High School. New guys from uptown middle schools showed up with the latest cool styles. Nice golf style wool shirts, real windbreaker jackets like the pro athletes wore. Decent looking slacks. Boat shoes. Si wore what was on sale at the cheap department store before last Christmas or near my birthday. Shoes were my Uncle's discards. Pants a inch too short or long. And, the girls noticed... them not me.
The cool kids had money, their parents had two cars, and they probably took real vacations, somewhere that didn't involve a tent. Rich was cool. It was clear that I was Not Cool. My self esteem was not high, as you could guess. But, I was soon saved by the greatest event in teenage social evolution... the removal of school dress codes. Now every guy looked like a slob, because they could. T-shirt, shorts, old tennis shoes. No one wore fancy anything. Rich didn't matter that much, because you could not show it. The counter-culture won!
Right after I got out of college, we entered the era of Disco. America's version of the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe. Women dressed in dancing clothes all the time, even if they really didn't have the body to. Men wore the abomination of the ages, Polyester suites. Men of my generation look back on Disco in the same way that historians view the use of leeches in medicine. What the hell were we thinking?
Ol' Si tends to put Disco style clothing on the list of things that you don't dwell over, lest you feel depressed and start drinking Gin again. Like going into combat or working at Cypress Semiconductor.
These days, clothing choices are a mixed bag. In The Valley, 'dressed up' is a pair of ironed Khakis from Land's End and a button down shirt of some type. Shoes? Anything/nothing OK. Execs dress up for important customer visits of course; new jeans and a golf shirt (with logo of a famous resort) are the rage. Women who can wear tight jeans do, those who can't wear fashionable skirts.
That is now the way in most of the US. East Coasters are still guys in suits, but that no longer has a good connotation. "Suits" in The Valley speak are clueless MBAs, who parachute in from a bank or consulting firm to reek destruction on your marketing plan or IPO proposal.
This is not to say you won't see suits on local people in The Valley. Walk into any Schwab or Fidelity Investments office. The guy or gal behind the counter wears a Wall Street -worthy suit, crisp white shirt and appropriate red power tie. They are helping someone with the forms needed to deposit those millions of dollars of Google stock options. The slightly confused customer is in shorts, wrinkled shirt and flip-flops. Hasn't shaved in a couple of days, probably just got through a code release all-nighter. The doorman at the Fairmont is very well dressed, helping scruffy locals out of their Tesla Roadsters or Porsche Turbos. Wealthy kids from Menlo Park buy the latest style of torn jeans and beach sandals from well dressed Nordstrom staffers.
Just for grins, I wore a dress shirt and tie to work last week. I had just got a decent haircut the day before, as was feeling a bit dapper. The very attractive lady in accounting smiled at me for the first time. My boss suddenly seemed nervous. The Prez gave me a long, confused look, almost catching his flip-flops on a cable bridge. People were generally uncomfortable around me.
I was the rich kid on the first day of High School! Maybe I will take a vacation... and leave the tent at home this time.
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