I’ve wondered about that too, Solveig. Or about uniforms in general. My son had a friend once who wouldn’t race his motorcycle because that day he was missing something or other and didn’t have the complete look of a motocross racer. It made me realize how powerfully and how early we come under the spell of collective symbolism.
It seems so tribal. I believe the word uniform is revealing. A man’s business suite gives a sense of normalcy to business, normalizes the male’s central position, and communicates the direct access that the wearer has to the central tenet of business, which is power and stature gained by winning business games.
It’s funny how easily uniformity comes to us, herd animals that we are. On the other hand, it’s impossible to be unique. Especially when we are in the “display mode” of wearing a uniform.
When we don something to communicate our individuality we inevitably end up looking kind of silly.
Individuality, the search for it, flirts with chaos and destruction. We never know when someone has successfully individualized—they are shrouded in invisibility.
A business suit marries ruthlessness and geniality. A “proper look” that communicates that our more ruthless practices establish our goodness, and that ruthlessness should to an extent be tolerated. The a "suit" betrays norms of geniality it threatens us because it violates the symbolism we place in the uniform. A "common man" meets with a different outrage because he has not violated our language of symbols. In fact he has confirmed them--a man without a suite acting commonly, as in both vulgar and unexceptional.
More positively, a suite can symbolize that we harness our instincts, and have learned to cooperate. On the level of gender pairing for procreation it can mean that a man is genteel enough to stand by the woman, or she and her family, yet ruthless enough to protect her.
In the metro publicity they were dressed all in white and were 3 times their normal size...really ridiculous.
