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. In1964, a Times fashion review featured another leisure suit, this one a cor-duroy shirt and matching trousers for at home wear. In 1968, one de-signer offered a short-sleeved version in plain cotton, and in 1969, anotherunveiled a jacket-and-pants combination made out of velvet.While fashion aesthetes devised exotic costumes for men to luxuri-ate in during their leisure hours, though, their real-life customers actuallyhad less and less opportunity to relax.As Juliet Schor notes in her 1991book The Overworked American, by the late 1960s the hours that full-time OOPS 166workers spent on the job was starting a climb that continues today.By theearly 1970s, clothing manufacturers finally had an epiphany: What theoffice drudge really needed was an outfit he could wear continuously,around the clock, in a variety of situations.For that sort of marathon wear, the natural fibers used in early ver-sions of the leisure suit simply wouldn t do, since they wrinkled and weretoo pricey for salaries ravaged by the stagnant Nixon-era economy.Tech-nology, however, had an answer: double-knit polyester.The syntheticfabric was knitted together in loops, rather than woven in an interlockingpattern, using a revolutionary double-needle process that some predictedwould make the loom obsolete.There was another advantage it wascheaper to make suits, thanks to new automated manufacturing processesthat fused seams with heat and pressure, reducing by half the amount ofstitching required.A clothing maker could churn out a cheapo grade Xsuit on an assembly line in as little as an hour and a half, less than half thetime required to make a higher-quality garment in wool.Leisure Goes Legit You just gotta have a leisure suit! exclaimed an ad by NewJersey based mail-order clothing retailer Haband s, and indeed, men did.In 1974, they grabbed up the garments so quickly that manufacturers hadtrouble meeting the demand.Such immediate acceptance of a radicallynew style was almost unheard-of behavior by male consumers, and theinvestment firm Merrill Lynch even issued a bulletin for investors aboutthe leisure suit s potential effect on the clothing market.According to astudy conducted in the mid-1980s by department store merchandising con-sultants, only about 8 percent of American men are early adapters of fash-ion trends, while 50 percent are oblivious of fashion, buying new clotheswhen old garments wear out.However, as psychologists Craig Johnsonand Brian Mullen wrote in their 1990 book The Psychology of ConsumerBehavior, fads, like mutant viruses, manage to propagate because they CULTURAL NORMS RESIST RADICAL CHANGE 167short-circuit the usual thinking process that precedes a purchase.So itwas with the leisure suit, which tugged on the loose thread of conformityand ended up unraveling good taste.By the summer of 1974, the New York Times was reporting thatthree main styles of leisure suits had emerged.The most popular was the safari suit, which had a winged collar, and sometimes epaulets and shortsleeves.Another variation included the battle jacket, which ended at thewaist, reminiscent of the outfit that General Dwight D.Eisenhower woreduring World War II.It could be worn with a necktie.Yet another was theshirt suit, a pajamalike outfit that vaguely evoked the wardrobe of HughHefner, or perhaps certain third world dictators.The leisure suit s popularity had overwhelmed the menswear mar-ket in small towns and cities across America, places that fashion trendsusually reached slowly and sometimes bypassed altogether.In Lincoln,Nebraska, the Evening Journal concluded that the leisure suit is whereit s at. The Newark (Ohio) Advocate offered locals advice on what sort ofshirt was acceptable to wear under their new leisure suits: turtlenecks,open-neck solids, prints and crew necks, open shirts with ascots, even noshirt at all. Only the bravest of Ohioans likely tried that last suggestion, but ithinted at the degree of sartorial anarchy that the leisure suit induced, asthe style evolved from playfully flamboyant to outright garish.The gar-ment came in colors seldom before seen in men s suits mocha, peach,fi re-engine red, pumpkin, forest green, sky blue.(Decades later, a vintageclothing store s Web site would struggle to describe one surviving speci-men as a shade of rust that is brown more than orange. ) In 1976, Haggarunveiled a special bicentennial-edition leisure suit white, with red andblue stitching, and a similarly patriotic belt.By early 1975, the leisure style had become so pervasive that inNew York, the Lord & Taylor University Club shop, traditionally devotedto the staid Ivy League look, had to confess that its top-selling item was a OOPS 168leisure suit.Even Max Evans, fashion director of tastemaker Esquire mag-azine, revealed that he was a fan of the style because it was comfortableand usually in easy-care fabric. Business Casual-tiesThat s not to say the garish, unorthodox garment was without de-tractors
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Tematy
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Mark A. Noll, Luke E. Harlow Religion and American Politics, From the Colonial Period to the Present (2007)
Jesse Fox Mayshark Post pop cinema; The search for meaning in new America (2007)(1)
William Inboden Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945 1960, The Soul of Containment (2008)
R. Murray Thomas Manitou and God, North American Indian Religions and Christian Culture (2007
Philip Gordon, Jeremy Shapiro Allies At War, America, Europe and the Crisis Over Iraq (2004)
Jane Elliott Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Representing National Time (2008)
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