Most of the time my preferred style of dress is pretty simple. Jeans, a shirt, sometimes it's a t-shirt other times not, boots, and some sort of hat. My hats are pretty varied and range from the simple ball cap to a fedora, a panama hat, to a western style "cowboy" hat of which I own several styles.
Ok, I like hats, what can I say?
But sometimes I like to wear a suit with or without a tie. Why? Because I appreciate the look of a decent suit. It feels good to put on nice looking clothes. Not for the sake of vanity as much as just projecting a different "look" or style. I normally wear a fedora with a suit. Gotta have the hat ya know.
I have been known to wear a suit in some pretty inappropriate situations, "just because". OK, I'll admit sometimes it's just to mess with people's heads.
One trucking company I worked for decided they wanted all of the drivers to wear a uniform for the sake of professional appearance. Now anyone who knows truckers knows that they are a pretty independent bunch of people and pretty hard headed as well.
I am no exception. There was no way I was going to wear that dorky looking uniform. Not gonna happen. Instead I started wearing a suit and tie every day. While trucking. A good many of my customers were blown away by this of course. Many of them expressed how much they liked it. I was even mistaken for a salesman on more than one occassion.
And I did have fun with it too. Often, while sitting at the counter in some truckstop I would get into a conversation with the other drivers. They would assume that I wasn't a driver based on my chosen mode of dress. Somewhere into the conversation I would always make some off hand remark about my load, logbooks, or the DOT. It was always fun to see the reactions. Even had one young guy say that if he saw me on the fuel island dressed like that he would intentionally spill diesel in my direction. My reaction was that's fine as long as you don't mind my taking the $1200 out of your ass.
A lot of drivers, especially the older ones really liked it and more than one thanked me for "bringing some class" to our industry.
After about 6 months of this my supervisor, the Director of Operations decided he had had enough of it. He had been having a great deal of trouble getting the drivers to wear the uniform and was cracking down. This schmuck actually had the nerve to try and write me up for not wearing the uniform on the grounds of not having a "professional appearance".
After I raised enough hell and took it to the owner of the company he decided to let the whole thing drop and issued a memo to all drivers that the uniform was optional as long as the drivers wore clean clothes without holes in them at customer facilities.
I retired the suits after that. The dry cleaning was killing me.
I still enjoy getting duded up in a nice suit, just because. Somehow it just feels good to put on some nice duds once in a while for no special reason. I have a special spot in my heart for the days when men always wore suits and a hat. It's only been in the past few decades that this has really changed.
How about you? What do you normally wear? Do you ever get dressed up "just because"? Why or why not?