Short Stuff: Leisure Suits

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1:18Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave. So that automatically just converted this to a short stuff, whether you like it or not, sucker. Converted. Very good. And we converted right back into the 70s accidentally, Chuck, because we're talking about leisure suits. And there's really no other decade that the leisure suit truly existed in. It's an icon of the 70s. I'm just going to come out and say it. Face it.

1:46Josh Clark:Yeah, I agree. And why do we feel the need to be so silly in short stuff? When did we give ourselves that permission? From the get? Pretty much from the get-go, yeah. All right.

1:57Chuck Bryant:They have a different tone, which I enjoy. Well, yeah. I mean, you don't want just the same thing. That's crazy.

2:03Josh Clark:Yeah, you never hear me going, meep, meep, meep, meep, converted on a regular episode. Those are far too serious.

2:10Chuck Bryant:For sure. They're dead serious. Very dry.

2:12Josh Clark:All right. It also gives us a chance to cover things like leisure suits, which, you know, we'll talk about sort of the precursors that weren't really leisure suits, but may have led to them. But the leisure suit that we're really talking about, obviously, is the one from the mid-70s, which was, you know, the jacket and pants thing with the wide lapels. And apparently they came about really in the 70s but had a lot of precursors, including the 1960s, when hippies were like, yeah, I got to wear a suit sometimes too, but I don't want to be a stuffy. So I want something a little more chill. Yeah.

2:50Chuck Bryant:And so, like, the guys in the 70s looked up from their lines of Coke and said, hey, we want to be more chilled, too. But we still have jobs, unlike those dirty hippies. So we need to have something to wear to the office, but also chill. So weirdly, a leisure suit is or it came out of the concept of hippies wearing suits at the office. That was where the leisure suit was born.

3:17Josh Clark:Yeah. Some early maybe inspirations, maybe some of these are reaches, but there had been in fashion history some other kind of a little more relaxed suits, including in 1800s Britain, there was something called a lounge suit. That was, you know, that was a very stuffy time when everything matched and everything was maybe even had like coattails and things. And this was just a little less structured, a little softer, and maybe the jacket and the pants didn't match, which was, you know, like a very casual look at the time.

3:48Chuck Bryant:Right. It was the original navy blazer with khakis. Yeah, probably. Pleated khakis.

3:55Josh Clark:Yeah.

3:55Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, that one's kind of like, all right, you can connect that. Just in that it was like a less, like you said, stuffy suit. And connect it a little further starting in the 1920s, the Roaring Twenties in the United States. There's something called a sack suit. And if you go look for images of this, you're going to see basically every type of suit there is. Yeah. All called sack suits. So I'm still not entirely certain what a sack suit looks like, but it's a tailored, relaxed type of suit as opposed to, say, something in, like, flannel with, like, sharp lines and stuff like that. That's the best I can explain it as.

4:32Josh Clark:Yeah, agreed. It can get confusing when you're looking this stuff up. but the leisure suit is noted for polyester and polyester didn't come around until the 1940s in the UK and didn't really like get big until the 1970s in the United States when the leisure suit came around and maybe we should take an early break because you have a little bit of a teaser on why, well, I don't know if it was named this for this reason or not but we'll settle it after this.

5:03Chuck Bryant:Okay.

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6:57All right.

6:58Josh Clark:This is what I don't quite understand. When the first sort of leisure suit as we know it came around in the 1970s, it was manufactured by Lee Jeans as the L-E-E-S-U-R-E suit. And is that where the name came from, like the leisure suit? My two cents is yes. Or were they playing on the fact that it was a leisure suit and they were like, Lee, sure.

7:25Chuck Bryant:No, I think that they were playing. It was a play on leisure, obviously, but I think they were the ones who introduced the word leisure to the concept of a relaxed suit. That's my take.

7:38Josh Clark:Okay, I found one ad that I think I found for the actual Lee Shore suit.

7:43Chuck Bryant:I saw that, too.

7:44Josh Clark:And, yeah, it's everything you think. It's like a disco stew-like guy.

7:49Chuck Bryant:Yes. It was designed by a guy named Jerry Rosengarten, who was designing for Lee at the time. And I think I saw it debuted in 1970 on the Lee website, which is gold. It debuted in 1972. But regardless, when Lee debuted it, remember, this is something that guys were like, we want something relaxed, but that we can wear for the office. and moms were like, we want something relaxed that is made out of durable fabric for my little boy to wear to Easter mass. Right. And that's pretty much what it was originally released for. It was like meant to be like less stuffy business attire slash Easter attire.

8:30Josh Clark:Yeah. And if you've never seen one, you know, the pants and the jacket match. It was the 70s, so the pants were flared, maybe a bell bottom, maybe just a nice flare. the jacket looked sort of like what you might call a shacket these days, like a shirt jacket.

8:47Chuck Bryant:I've never heard that before. Oh, you've never heard of a shacket? No. I've heard of Shaquille O 'Neal, but that's the closest.

8:54Josh Clark:I mean, you've seen shackets. It's like a, you know, like a shirt jacket. I'll point one out next time we're hanging out.

9:00Chuck Bryant:Okay, thank you.

9:01Josh Clark:Or maybe I'll buy you one. Okay. So they have wide lapels, the leisure suit did. Some of them did have a vest, like if you think of the classic Travolta suit that we'll talk about at the end, that had a matching vest. Sharp. And another kind of big giveaway was they usually had contrasting stitching. So the stitching was a different color than the suit, which is a look.

9:26Chuck Bryant:It is definitely a look. A lot of people, I don't want to say a lot. Some people would actually just go buck wild and wear white patent leather shoes with them. And you can see there's plenty of pictures from the 1970s, people standing in front of their Malibu proudly wearing a leisure suit with like white patent leather shoes. And I think Cousin Eddie wears patent leather shoes, white shoes with his leisure suit, if I'm not mistaken.

9:54Josh Clark:He's a great example.

9:55Chuck Bryant:And then another great example is Otho from Beetlejuice. when Beetlejuice pulls his smart suit off and all of a sudden he's wearing blue polyester leather suit with white patent leather shoes. People actually wore that, Chuck.

10:09Josh Clark:Yeah, they wore that stuff. It never became office wear like they were hoping it would, I think. I'm sure some people wore it to the office, but it was kind of frowned upon. It was for like a more formal thing like that. And it was definitely more for like hitting the disco or going out or getting together with neighbors and that kind of thing when you wanted to look dressy. but I guess still be comfortable. But it was like an it look for about 10 minutes and then it became a bit of a joke.

10:38Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I think it started to be forbidden at like nicer restaurants. You couldn't wear it. And I'm guessing the reason why is because most people paired it with a shirt that was well open at the collar, lots of chest hair flowing out, medallions. Like it was not an appropriate suit for the kind of place the Blues Brothers showed up to get their maitre d' horn player fired from.

11:02Josh Clark:Boy, nice reference. And, you know, before too long, it's out of style. You know, styles come and go, but the leisure suit did not last long. That 80s power suit came in pretty quickly. And, you know, now it's just a little blip on the radar of fashion history.

11:20Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it's a signifier, right? So, like, Disco Stu is definitely going to be wearing a leisure. suit or leisure suit Larry obviously is going to be wearing a leisure suit too. But like you said, I think the most iconic leisure suit of all time was Travolta's from Saturday Night Fever.

11:38Josh Clark:Yeah, that's had an interesting history over the years. It was purchased for the film from a store in New Jersey, not surprisingly, for about a hundred bucks and very famously, and we've talked about this before, Gene Siskel, the The great, great movie reviewer with his partner, Roger Ebert, owned that suit. He bought it in 1978 for a couple of grand, which was a great deal because he sold it in 1995 for$145 ,000.