Short Stuff: Leisure Suits

Josh Clark (0:04)

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.

Chuck Bryant (0:14)

Beep, beep, beep, beep, converted.

Josh Clark (0:16)

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.

Chuck Bryant (0:32)

Yeah, I agree. And why do we feel the need to be so silly in short stuff? So when did we give ourselves that permission? From the get?

Josh Clark (0:39)

Pretty much from the get go, yeah.

Chuck Bryant (0:41)

All right. They have a different tone, which I enjoy.

Josh Clark (0:45)

Well, yeah, I mean, you don't want just the same thing. That's crazy.

Chuck Bryant (0:48)

Yeah, you never hear me going, beep, beep, beep, beep, converted on a regular episode. Those are far too serious.

Josh Clark (0:55)

For sure. They're dead serious, very dry.

Chuck Bryant (0:57)

All right. It also gives us a chance to cover things like leisure suits, which 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 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.

Josh Clark (1:34)

Yeah. 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 came out of the concept of hippies wearing suits at the office.

That was where the leisure suit was born.

Chuck Bryant (2:02)

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 a very stuffy time when everything matched, and everything was maybe even had like coat tails 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 like a very casual look at the time.

Josh Clark (2:33)

Right. It was the original Navy blazer with khakis.

Chuck Bryant (2:37)

Yeah, probably.

Josh Clark (2:38)

Pleated khakis. Yeah. So yeah, that one's kind of like, all right, you can connect that.

In that, it was like a less, like you said, stuffy suit.

Chuck Bryant (2:48)

Yeah.

Josh Clark (2:48)

You can connect it a little further, starting in the 1920s, the roaring 20s 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, 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 flannel with sharp lines and stuff like that. That's the best I can explain it as.

Chuck Bryant (3:17)

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 get big until the 1970s in the United States. When the leisure suit came around, and maybe we should take an early break because we 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.

Josh Clark (3:48)

Okay.

Chuck Bryant (4:19)

All right. 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 LEE-SURE suit. And is that where the name came from, like the leisure suit?

Josh Clark (4:40)

My two cents is yes.

Chuck Bryant (4:41)

Or were they playing on the fact that it was a leisure suit, and they were like, Lee, sure.