Good luck on your travels today. According to reports, you’re going to need it.
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Good luck on your travels today. According to reports, you’re going to need it.
Comments are closed.
Back in the heyday, Americans used to dress up for travel on trains, planes, and buses. Today, they dress down and civility, politeness, and friendliness has gone down as well.
I still dress to travel. My golfing buddies were giving me a hard time for wearing a blazer and slacks as we were being seated on a plane, One said, “you must think you get better service dressed that way.” Right on cue, the stewardess helped me off with my jacket and asked me if She could bring me a complimentary cocktail after she hung up my blazer (we were not in first class). After thanking her and ordering a G&T,
I turned back to my buddies and answered yes to their original question.
I too have had similar, and unexpected, experiences while traveling dressed in similar attire.
Best Regards and Happy Thanksgiving 2018,
Speaking of travel clothing–most of it (I’ve seen) consists of polar fleece, spandex, and other synthetic crap. How in the hell a style of dress grounded in woven natural fibers can make room for that stuff is beyond me. Wasn’t it included in the most recent version of the preppy handbook? Sad.
It’s hideous, god-forsaken garbage. Pollution. Is it ironic that so much comfort, leisure, and athletic wear is, in fact, doing us great harm? Irony verging on tragedy: when so-called “environmentalists” wear it.
A plea, then.
This shopping season, do not buy polar fleece. It’s bad for the world and it looks awful.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/20/microfibers-plastic-pollution-oceans-patagonia-synthetic-clothes-microbeads
https://www.outsideonline.com/2091876/patagonias-new-study-finds-fleece-jackets-are-serious-pollutant
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/02/06/511843443/are-we-eating-our-fleece-jackets-microfibers-are-migrating-into-field-and-food
Happy Thanksgiving from London!
Family motto — ‘wear a tie when you fly’. Better service, always,
It is true – well dressed with high quality bags, watch and cologne and you sail through security, even if the shank in your shoe does set the metal detector alarm off. Meanwhile old ladies are asked to pass their shoes through the X-ray machine. Talking of cologne, perhaps something about how we all ought to smell may be in order as we enter the festive season, CC. Happy Thanksgiving to all our American cousins.
A funny story: My father always used to ask where he should hang his coat.
Still always best to dress up in coat and tie when you travel. And if I do not go first class, I prefer to stay home. Even the train to Boston or DC, you get better service. In the distant past, a hat made a big difference, my bespoke Locke & Co. fedora; even the police would often clear your path.
Happy Thanksgiving. A special thanks for the Red Sox and to Red Sox Nation!
Tomorrow is Black Friday, or what I like to call “Buy Nothing Day.” S.E. is correct when he says that fast fashion and unfettered consumerism are destroying the planet.
The top ten most polluted cities on Earth are mostly in India and China where H&M, Zara, and others like them pollute the air and water with chemicals, dyes, and solvents used to make cheap jeans, shirts, and disposable garments.
After seeing the disturbing images in Businessweek I made a holiday resolution to buy mindfully: keeping my clothes as long as possible and buying new clothes only when needed. There is a quote by Thoreau about treating old clothes like they are old friends…
Thoreau: “A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet — if a hero ever has a valet — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.”
I travel weekly. Around 50 RT flights per year. I always dress business formal on planes.
You get treated better. You get upgrades. It comes with respect.
I recently was on a corporate retreat with several of my employees. I gave them specific direction to dress accordingly as they would for the office. Many from other organizations were flabbergasted to see my employees in suits at the airport. As soon as we all boarded the plane, those in yoga pants and sweatshirts were quick to realize the err of their ways. My people were thanked by the flight attendants and treated according to their perceived stature based on attire. It may sound vane, but it’s reality.
When I got my first full-time job after graduate school, I wore a suit & tie & fedora every day. Even though I was not required to dress nicely, I thought it appropriate to dress in a professional manner. Soon, I noticed that the way people treated me during the week, when I was in a suit, was different from how they treated me on the weekends, when I dressed casually.
Now I usually wear a jacket & tie & fedora, and still get treated nicely, most of the time.
Clothes do make the man—and they make the man get treated better.
I think it was the late Karl Lagerveldt who said ‘ vanity, is the finest form of self-preservation ‘.