the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

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manhood would look like a habitual patron at the Loser’s Lounge. (No
wonder that comedian Steve Martin made the leisure suit the favored attire
of the Festrunk brothers, those pair of “wild and crazy” sex-crazed
eastern Euro pe an émigré-rubes that he and Dan Aykroyd portrayed on
Saturday Night Live.)
How easy it is to forget that for a brief, hallucinatory interlude in
the mid-1970s, the leisure suit seemed like the hottest phenomenon ever
in the history of the American menswear industry. In 1974, males across
the United States spent the equivalent of $6.7 billion in today’s dollars on
leisure suits, and clamored for them so frantically that manufacturers
couldn’t keep up with the demand. In 1975, at one Manhattan men’s
store, 65 percent of the suits sold were of the leisure variety. In 1976, the
high-water mark of the leisure suit’s popularity, a single Chicago clothing
store, Richman Brothers, sold seventy thousand of the garments. But the
garment that now crowds thrift- store racks was more than just another
short-lived fashion experiment gone awry, like the eight-buttoned neo-
Edwardian look in the 1960s or voluminous parachute pants in the 1980s.
Strange as it may seem, there was a time when the leisure suit was hailed
as the most revolutionary development in men’s attire since the waistcoat
and breeches were supplanted by the business suit in the mid-1800s.
For generations, middle-class American males had struggled in
vain with the intricacies of the Windsor knot, and meekly complied with
the dictum that they needed one wardrobe for the offi ce—tailored according
to mysterious, niggling rules of propriety—and another set of clothes
for the rest of their waking hours. As tacky as it might look to us today, to
the man of the 1970s, the leisure suit offered permanent, necktie-free liberation
from fashion faux pas. It was advertised as the first male attire that
could be worn appropriately at virtually any occasion, from the boardroom
to the nightclub dance fl oor.
“Can an executive wear at work what he wears at play?” a Macy’s
television commercial asked. “Can a lawyer meet with a client dressed like