the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

CULTURAL NORMS RESIST RADICAL CHANGE 169
negatively to the new style. In 1976, corporate fashion con sultant Malloy
surveyed forty managers in offices where employees wore leisure suits.
Only one of the bosses was wearing a leisure suit himself. A resounding
thirty-four of the remaining thirty-nine said they would be more likely to
trust an important assignment to a man in a traditional suit. Fourteen said
they would be less likely to promote a man who wore leisure suits. Malloy
found that bosses considered leisure suits acceptable only if they were
made of some material other than polyester, preferably in a solid color. A
few companies—including, the New York Times reported, an unnamed
department store that probably sold leisure suits—banned employees
from wearing them at all. (The very name “leisure suit,” which suggested
that the garment inspired languor in workers, certainly didn’t help.)
Nobody wanted to commit career suicide in the name of having a
versatile wardrobe, especially in the sputtering economy of the mid-1970s.
The leisure suit might have survived anyway as sportswear if it had delivered
on the “hassle-free” comfort that manufacturer John Pomer touted
in an ad. Instead, membership in the fashion avant-garde required putting
up with double-knit polyester’s tendency to trap moisture, rather than
breathing as natural fibers did. On warm days, a leisure suit doubled as a
portable sauna. “It had an especially bad reputation in Texas and the
Southwest,” synthetic fabric scientist Dmitry Gagarine told United Press
International in 1983. And the material, especially in the cheaper suits,
was so stiff that some wearers joked that they could stand their leisure
suits up in a corner rather than hanging them in the closet. For all its
coarse scratchiness, it wasn’t particularly durable. “The double-knits
were shiny and would snap and snag,” Paul Apostol, director of woven
markets for Celanese Fibers, told the Wall Street Journal in 1985. “It was
tacky clothing.”
By the summer of 1976, a little more than two years after the leisure
suit had emerged as the hottest fad in fashion, it was starting to wane.
In New York, sales slowed so abruptly that retailers were forced to offer
50 percent off on their inventory. That year, the clothing industry sold 6