Goldman Sachs, Patagonia, And The Mysteries Of “Business Casual”

The other day, on the subway, I observed an American male in contemporary business-casual costume. The color of his trousers was richly nondescript. He wore the clean good sneakers of a cautious wonk working on the weekend. His wire-rimmed Ray-Bans, neither glaringly retro nor conspicuously modish, cut a young-executive profile. A corporate logo on the breast of his synthetic-wool fleece vest suggested that he worked for the limited-liability company developing One Vanderbilt Place, a super-tall skyscraper going up on East Forty-second Street, where it will tower over the row of Madison Avenue men’s stores that are the enduring old corridor of establishment style. This was late-modern capitalist menswear settling into Spring/Summer 2019. The fleece was the right weight to meet the cultural weather. Read more at The New Yorker.