the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

CULTURAL NORMS RESIST RADICAL CHANGE 165
grassroots resentment against the old rules began to emerge. But the tip-
ping point may have been the Watergate scandal, in which an assortment
of traditionally attired Nixon administration offi cials were paraded before
the TV cameras and shown to be liars or worse. Public opinion research
by John T. Malloy, a corporate fashion con sultant and author of the Dress
for Success manual, found that the credibility rating for someone in a conservatively
cut gray suit and club tie plummeted from 81 percent in 1972
to just 57 percent in 1973, while the believability rating for a dandy in
wide lapels and a colorful shirt rose from 28 percent to 62 percent. The
timing was right for a new style that would cash in on those male corporate
middle- class blues.
As it happened, the leisure suit had already been lingering on the
experimental fringe of fashion for several decades. It evolved not from the
coat and tie but from the safari suit, a khaki ensemble with roomy pockets
and epaulets that was worn by colonial troops in Africa and later popu larized
by American outdoorsmen such as President Theodore Roo sevelt and
author Ernest Hemingway. Another possible distant relation was the
custom- made velvet “siren suit” worn by British prime minister Winston
Churchill, a flamboyant but unorthodox clotheshorse, who stubbornly insisted
on being comfortable and fashionable as he braved German rocket
attacks during World War II. In postwar America, designers vainly coaxed
men to try similarly adventurous attire in their off hours, such as a terry
cloth one-piece “leisure suit” that a 1952 New York Times fashion spread
touted as “suggested for TV sessions or around-the-house lounging.” In
1964, a Times fashion review featured another leisure suit, this one a corduroy
shirt and matching trousers for “at home wear.” In 1968, one designer
offered a short-sleeved version in plain cotton, and in 1969, another
unveiled a jacket-and-pants combination made out of velvet.
While fashion aesthetes devised exotic costumes for men to luxuriate
in during their leisure hours, though, their real-life customers actually
had less and less opportunity to relax. As Juliet Schor notes in her 1991
book The Overworked American, by the late 1960s the hours that full-time