Should Mark Zuckerberg Wear a Suit?

     So Wall Street was not very impressed last week with Mark Zuckerberg's wearing of a hoodie as he launches the campaign for Facebook's IPO. It has started a debate about whether Zuckerberg should or should not wear a hoodie. Some say he shouldn't have to, that by now he has earned the right to dress how he pleases, that it's results that matter, not appearance, and that he may even purposely be thumbing his nose at the establishment if you will. Others say that not wearing the hoodie is a mark of immaturity and very disrespectful and unprofessional, and that if you want investors to hand you lots of their money to a company, then you need to show them some respect.

     I do agree that results matter more than looks, that just because someone is dressed nice has absolutely nothing to do with what skills they have. While I have no empirical proof of it, I have a hunch that techie culture also tends to be wary of dressing nice because many techies were the "uncool" kids in high school that were ignored or made fun of by the "cool" kids (who usually are nicely dressed). Techies respect one another not by fashion or looks, but by brains and accomplishment. The thing is though, Zuckerberg has already proven himself a great deal, so why not just be respectful to the investors and show up in a suit?

     I think another reason many techies disdain the suit is because they see it as too constricting and too conformist. If you are used to dressing comfortably, and not necessarilly even grooming much as is the case with lots of long-haired and/or bearded techies, the idea of putting on a uniform (just the word there, uniform, says it all for them) that requires wrapping a thing around one's neck and tying it, and then having to have a haircut, be clean-shaven, etc...it just goes completely against their psychology. To them, the whole get-up represents comformity, standardization, lack of creativity, boring, and so forth. They see the suit as the clothing of the bureaucrat, whether corporate or governmental.

     While it is true that a lot of people who wear suits are conformist, non-creative types, I disagree entirely with the notion that the suit represents such a person. And except during very hot days, a suit and tie should not be uncomfortable at all unless it is fitted wrongly. But a person could very much be an individual-thinking, creative person, but yet still wear a suit. Suits can be individualized as well. The most common-looking suit that all the politicians wear is the black suit, which I don't care much for myself for this reason. But there are other colors, such as blue, gray, brown, etc...in different shades, and in different patterns and materials, that one can wear. There's tweed, herringbone, linen, cotton, there's pinstripe, Glen Plaid, Prince of Wales, and so on. In terms of designs, there's the two-piece suit, of which there's one-button, two-button, and three-button two-piece suits, there's single-breasted and double-breasted, and there's also the classic three-piece suit, which I think is really cool:

The above doesn't look like a conformist to me. To the contrary, it's a very classical and timeless look (all suits used to be three-piece until World War II, when due to fabric shortages, they started making them two-piece).

     And there are all different kinds of ties, with all sorts of different patterns. One can individualize the suit through wearing different shirts, ties, cufflinks, etc...you could technically wear the same suit day after day, but make it look different each time via a different color of shirt, tie, different cufflinks, and so forth.

     One of the things I find interesting is that, in the techie world, they don't like to wear suits because they consider them conformist. But the thing is, SO MANY of them dress in plain clothes, that if you saw a guy like Mark Zuckerberg actually wearing a suit, one could reason that THAT would be a truly individual, non-coformist thing to do. It's a case of people doing something considered radical, but then so many people begin doing it, that what was once radical becomes the norm, and what was once the norm becomes the new radical. Dressing in plain clothes used to be rebellious, but now it's the norm among many of those guys. A twenty-something techie wearing say a three-piece suit, now that would be unique.

     If I was Zuckerberg, I would wear a suit, but try to really individualize it with a special custom tie, say a tie with a pattern on it that somehow relates to Facebook. A lot of ties have playful patterns to them, of small animals for example and other colorful and playful things. Hermes started this trend in ties I believe back in the 1980s. So Mark could wear a suit to show the Wall Street investors respect and look professional, but at the same time, retain that techie rebelliousness by wearing a tie patterned in some playful way that relates to Facebook or social networking or whatnot.

     I think one other reason Zuckerberg should wear a suit is that while Facebook is a huge social network and is valued very highly, in terms of actually earning lots of money, it has yet to do this. Facebook's revenue in 2011 was $3.71 billion. That's not much for a company that is going to be valued perhaps as high as $100 billion dollars. If Facebook's actual revenue and profits matched such a valuation, then I could more see Zuckerberg's wearing the hoodie if he feels like it. But he has yet to really make Facebook earn the big money. Until this happens, he should be humble and respectful to the investors I think. None of this is to take away from what he has accomplished, but there is still a lot more that he must accomplish and you need to come across as respectful when you are expecting investors to give you lots of money for what is still an unproven company at the moment.