Summer is acoming and I can't help but turn to the mystery of the male suit. We live in a culture that would regard the wearing of something like, say, the Mao suit, as a horrific desecration of the rights of the individual. After all, what's the point of going through all the hassles of voting for a democracy if you can't then express your individuality and creativity through something as primal as clothes, hairstyles and access to MAC cosmetics?
Yet, every day, many of the blokes who dwell in this democracy get up in the morning, have their 30-minute showers and then put on a suit and hurry off to work (or drive with their jacket neatly hooked up on the passenger hanger behind them).
Yes, the idea of grown men getting around in almost identical suits like a bunch of schoolboys is absurd. But, despite its absurdity, there doesn't seem to be any question of getting rid of this male business uniform.
No one is stopping to say, "Hang on a sec, the emperor is not wearing new clothes, he's wearing that same old dreary jacket and trousers that he wore last week and the week before that and the week before that.....".
Nope, we may be teetering on the very brink of
a new millennium full of wonderful possibilities,hut the blokes are still compliantly trotting off to
work every day in their suits - navy; black, grey or a daring but dubious khaki..
It's not as if suits are even a particularly attractive-looking idea. They hump and pull across the back, they restrict free movement of the arms, they turn the most shapely male bottom into something resembling a vertical pikelet..
 They also have to be worn with that other most absurd item of clothing, the tie, a "fashion statement" which men are liable to take to hysterical extremes of volume in terms of pattern/colour/cute in an attempt to inject some kind of personality into their workaday garb..
Now it's summer, the suit becomes even more of a liability. For it is the remnant of many earlier forms of clothing (frock coats, pantaloons, doublets, hose ...), all of which were developed in a cooler northern hemisphere. For a burning Australian summer sun, a suit is about as appropriate as thermal underwear at Christmas time. That's true no matter how much the shops try to jazz up "cool wool" or the crumpled linen look..
Yet, despite the temperature, how often do blokes actually clean these things? Women arc constantly dragging their work clothes off to the drycleaners and all this, mind you, when a woman will only wear that suit every second week or so. But the men, who are likely to wear their suits as much as two or three times a week, seem to think it's perfectly adequate just to bung them back in the closet and perhaps give 'em an airing every month or two..
I have my doubts about this. So there is the suit - worrisomely uniform, impractical and probably not very hygienic. Why do men stick with it? Obviously, of course, because they are brilliant. Women just imagine what it must be like to get up in the morning and reach for the nearest suit, clean shirt and the tie that you didn't dribble bolognese sauce on yesterday - the peace, the freedom and the considerable financial advantages... So no wonder men are not coming forward to denounce the male suit as an outmoded and repetitive mode of dressing. They have too much to lose..
Jane Freeman The Australian Magazine ,November 21-22, 1998
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