Last year, I did Dry January. I’m happy I did it, so that I never have to do it again. Of course, alcohol is best enjoyed in healthy moderation and good company. But corralled into the corner of a bar, with a friend of a friend of a friend recounting their grad school application process directly into my ear, I wanted something stronger than soda water and bitters.
I have heard many Dry January believers explain why they do it. (How could you not? Lunchroom Army recruiters are subtler with their approach.) And I suspect that the benefits people claim from Dry January, such as feeling good in the morning and focusing at work, can be achieved without forgoing alcohol.
You just have to wear a suit every day.
I think I got the idea from my father, who wore a suit every day for his whole career. There are many differences to how we work: he works at a big company, I’m a freelancer; he goes to an office, I work remotely; he sits in a chair at a desk, I recline on a couch with a MacBook balanced on my sternum. But I have always suspected that if I just put on the suit, everything else would fall into place.
This year, I put Suit January to the test. Thirty-one days of putting on a shirt, jacket, and tie, and seeing if it changed my life any more than skipping booze did. Can you actually dress your way to success?
The most common claim about Dry January is that it makes you feel better in the morning. My hypothesis: Putting on a suit does the same. Steaming your pants, tucking in your shirt, and tying your tie constitute a pregame ritual that mentally prepares you for the day ahead.
On January 1, I woke up hollow and bleary after a wonderful dinner the night before at an Argentinian steakhouse in the East Village. A giant ribeye, blood sausage, a bottle of Malbec all to myself, and absolutely nothing green or fibrous sloshed around in my belly. It was 17 degrees outside. Time to get dressed. I even showered and shaved. What’s the point of putting a suit on if your hair is greasy and there’s hair dangling out of your chin mole? I wore the new suit I bought just for January: gray chalk-stripe vintage Polo from an estate sale. I tied my tie, laced up my Oxfords, and braved the elements. I felt fantastic. Then, I traveled with my friends to Long Island for a hockey game. Sitting in the nosebleeds in my suit, I looked like a season ticket rep getting an early start on my annual quota. I felt like someone who had signed up to look stupid every day for the next month.
My biggest hope for my self-inflicted Suit January was that it would help me do better at work. The wrinkle here is that I have nobody to impress with my clothes. As a freelance writer, I spend my days at home or in a coworking space where I say almost nothing beyond “Good morning” and “Bless you.” When I video-called one of my freelance clients while wearing a double-breasted navy suit in a Zoom cubicle the size of a confessional, he literally laughed at me. He could not believe that I had put on a suit for this.
But ultimately, we get dressed for ourselves. Working by myself, I often lose steam around 3 p.m. By then, my main tasks are finished, and while there’s always more to do, I often don’t do it. It’s at this point that many afternoons are lost to YouTube and onanism.
The suit fixed this on both fronts. It was simply too pathetic to lay on the couch, or God forbid, in bed, while wearing a suit. Removing it—finding a hanger, lining up the creases on my pants—was too annoying. So, I found myself remaining upright, at the computer, and figuring out something to do every day.
I’m not exactly sure what the mechanism is, but a suit makes you ask hard questions of yourself: Why did I put on a suit just to spend the day scrolling? I already bothered to get dressed up, so why not do another hour of work? What kind of schmuck wears a suit to sit on the couch? Taking off the suit waves the white flag of surrender on your productive day—so I didn’t. Day in, day out, the suit kept me at my desk and off my phone. Without hyperbole, this was the most powerful productivity hack I have ever tried. I even felt my posture improve. Paging Dr. Huberman!
My biggest concern going into Suit January was looking corporate, like a banker or lawyer. Turns out, even The Suits don’t wear suits anymore. A friend who works in private equity told me that if he wore a tie to the office, his coworkers would call him a try-hard (or much worse). In practice, the only risk is looking like a Catholic schoolboy or a doorman.
Simply put, almost nobody wears a suit these days; the only young(ish) Suit Guys are Zohran Mamdani and Nick Fuentes. While I walked around feeling like Don Draper and Barney Stinson, multiple people told me I reminded them of a weird dork from their middle school who always wore a suit for some reason. I began to worry this whole thing was coming off less “international playboy” and more “internship with a local elected official.”
Midway through the month, I flew to New Orleans for a joint bachelor-bachelorette party. Of course, I wore a blazer to the airport, with more suits getting wrinkled in my carry-on roller. I recalled Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s recent exhortations to “go back to an era where we didn’t wear our pajamas to the airport.” This messaging came as part of his signature “The Golden Age of Travel Starts with You” civility campaign, which asks air travelers to ask themselves “Are you dressing with respect?” Great, I realized. I didn’t just look like a banker or a nerd. I looked Republican.
Then, I landed in the Big Easy. I cruised Bourbon Street in a jacket and tie, missing barf puddles with my loafers and spilling fluorescent green Hand Grenades all over myself. One of my blazer buttons somehow flew off in a casino. I was repeatedly mistaken for a University of Georgia fraternity pledge visiting town for one of the massive destination formals taking over the city. On Saturday, we dined at Antoine’s, the nation’s oldest family-owned restaurant since 1840. Like the other old-guard New Orleans restaurants, Antoine’s has required men to wear a jacket in the dining room for most of its existence. Today, against a ceaseless barrage of golf polos, polyblend sweaters, and button-downs with “fun patterns,” they’ve given up. Today, jackets and collared shirts are just “strongly suggested,” and the suggestion is broadly ignored. I was the only man with a tie in our party’s private dining room. The gawky young employee making cocktails looked better than most of us.
The women in our group had, of course, dressed up for the occasion. Chatting on a wrought iron balcony overlooking the French Quarter, slurping oysters Rockefeller under a Gilded Age chandelier and toasting the bride and groom with Sazeracs, I couldn’t help but feel like the other guys looked like slobs. I became convinced that had we all put on suits, we would have had even more fun. The University of Georgia frat brothers, all in tuxedos and cowboy boots at their own party across Rue St. Louis, had us beat.
I must confess there were moments of weakness. Early on, my shirt collars chafed my neck and caused a rash. During the New Orleans trip, we went on a gator tour with an inherent risk of getting splashed; I simply had not packed enough outfits to risk it, so I wore a sweater instead. On the frigid January days when New York was a maze of dirty, salty ice, I really wished I had snow boots on instead of dress shoes. On one such day, I had to go into the bathroom before sitting down for dinner to wipe muddy brown gunk off my pants cuffs. Wearing a suit to work made me feel good; wearing a suit to brunch with my girlfriend on a Sunday morning made me feel elderly.
But I persevered. Just as you feel good at the end of a hike, no matter how much it sucked on the way up, I finished the month with a newfound love for the suit. I like wearing them. I feel good wearing them. We men are lost, worshipping at the false idol of comfort. We think that being as relaxed as possible means wearing nothing that could ever resemble tailoring, made of only breathable, sweat-wicking, wrinkle-resistant, four-way stretch, cool-to-the-touch, quick-dry fabrics. How much moisture are you guys generating?
You don’t work better in sweatpants, because your body can subconsciously tell that you actually want to be on the couch. For the same reason, you don’t party better in a designer T-shirt. When James Bond walks into a party in a tuxedo, do you think he wishes his clothes were “relaxed fit”? Do you think he regrets wearing a tie?
In my final week of Suit January, my girlfriend’s friend got us on the list for a fancy party at The Whitney. I did not fully understand the scale of the event until I walked in: open bar, The Dare DJing, the first lady of New York City in attendance. In any other month, this would be the kind of sartorial situation I’d stress about and still mess up. This time, I was dressed perfectly in my usual suit and tie. I can’t say the same for the other men in attendance: Lots of big swings, and lots of big misses. Lots of guys in a bad beige sweater next to a woman in a floor-length gown. We’ve heard a lot about male loneliness. What about the male swaglessness epidemic?
You’ve got 11 months until the next Suit January. In the meantime, try wearing a suit once in a while. At least you’ll never have to worry about being underdressed.