I spent the last week gliding around San Francisco in the now infamous“Suitsy,” an adult-sized pajama onesie disguised as a full business suit. At bars and in meetings, no one seemed to notice anything amiss. But, perhaps, I thought, this was because San Francisco is the home of weird attire and my colleagues were just unfazed.
So I found the only place in the Bay Area were most people were guaranteed to be wearing suits: a Republican convention.
![Suitsy]()
Last weekend, the liberty-loving tech organization, Lincoln Labs, held a rally for presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul. There were suits oozing out the front door waiting to get a selfie with the libertarian icon. I blended right in.
Indeed, one dressed-down hip conservative asked me why I chose to join the other square stiffs wearing formal attire, “This is Silicon Valley — what are you doing?” he chuckled.
It was at this point that I unzipped my onesie suit and revealed the comfy glory of what I was actually wearing. Gasps of disbelief echoed around me as if Criss Angel had just made a statue of Ronald Reagan appear out of thin air. “Whaaa?! No way!”
The consensus was clear: Everyone thought I was wearing a traditional suit.
Last fall, a crowdfunding campaign to create the Suitsy became an instant meme; the Suitsy was a totem for everything that people loved and loathed about Silicon Valley. "Good Morning America" praised its quirky bohemian ingenuity while GQ hailed it as an omen for the end times.
For six months after the press went nuts, its creator, Jesse Herzog and Silicon Valley-based retailer Betabrand, have been heads down turning the concept piece into a reality. I managed to get my hands on the first production run and tested it out in the real world.
Below is the first hands-on review of the Suitsy and, below that, is a data-driven analysis of how our economy got to a point where it’s acceptable for grown men to wear pajamas at work.
![suitsy business one piece suit]()
To be sure, without the twin Silicon Valley powers of internet crowdfunding and casual tech-office attire, Herzog never would have never been more than faint blip on the fashion radar.
The question I had in reviewing the Suitsy was whether it’s just a gimmick or a legit substitute for men’s office attire. As with all things at The Ferenstein Wire, we tested this quantitatively.
A suit comfortable enough to sleep in
![Suitsy]()
For four days I barely took the Suitsy off — and never wanted to. I worked out, went grocery shopping, held business meetings, and went out drinking at a bar in it. As a blogger who spends most of my workday in pajamas anyways, it was like wearing my normal attire all day long.
Were it not for occasional glances in retail-shop windows, I would have thought I was at home in sweatpants.
Indeed, it’s just as comfortable to sleep in. Compared to the night before sleeping in sweatpants, my deep sleep actually improved about 3% while in the Suitsy (as measured by the Basis band health tracker).
![Suitsy]()
This isn’t to say that the Suitsy improved my sleep; but it certainly didn’t keep me from a restful slumber.
Does it look like a regular suit?
For style, the Suitsy is no match for an expensive tailored ensemble, especially for folks who like to don the latest seasonal colors. But that’s like comparing the top speed of a Ford Mustang to a Prius, when all you really want is a car to pick up milk at the grocery store. The Suitsy is meant to satisfy the bare minimum requirements, not make a statement.
So long as it can pass undetected as just another neck-strangling suit, the Suitsy has achieved its goal. As an avid data geek who worries about an entirely subjective evaluation, I decided to test the Suitsy’s style prowess as scientifically as I could.
I compared professional photos of me in my normal suit to the Suitsy, and conducted a small poll online (using Survey Monkey and and sample of U.S.-based Amazon Turks). Respondents were asked, “Which suit do you like better” — no other details were provided.
My normal suit won the poll, of course, but the Suitsy managed an admirable showing, with 20% of respondents preferring the disguised adult onesie (full details here).
At the end of my trial, the Suitsy definitely proved its worth in both style and comfort. It won’t make you look like the sharpest trendsetter at the negotiating table. But if you’re like me, and wear a business suit once or twice a year, the Suitsy is more than a sufficient substitute.
Creative class fashion
The Suitsy is no one-hit wonder; it’s part of a long line of comfort-first clothing items successfully crowdfunded through the Silicon Valley clothing startup Betabrand. Rather than rely on a few expert designers to predict next season’s fashion trends, Betabrand’s audience votes on prototypes through a Kickstarter-like platform.
If enough consumers commit to preordering a pair of pants or a onesie business suit, a batch gets sent to the factory for mass production. “When we develop products, we try to connect them to Web communities and let them do the talking,” explains Betabrand cofounder, Chris Lindland.
Betabrand’s avid early consumers were mostly bi-coastal professionals who wanted pants that could withstand a bicycle commute to the office. When Betabrand offered up the “Bike To Work Pant” for crowdfunding, the blogosphere exploded. “Something like a thousand unique sites point at our pants and we sold batch after batch.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s famous hoodie-wearing habit become the inspiration for Betabrand’s next viral sensation: a hoodie with business suit-like stripes.
![Betabrand dress sweatpants]()
Indeed, Lindland’s early vision for Betabrand was “fashion for the Creative Class, ” referring to the growing legion of geeks turned highly skilled professionals first identified by University of Toronto Professor Richard Florida. The Creative Class are “educated, early adopters who are professionally connected to the Web and tend to have larger-than-average social reach,” explains Lindland.
So while Facebook’s engineers can lallygag into work in a pizza-stained hoodie, most creative class workers aren’t lucky enough to have a billionaire CEO that wears T-shirts to press events; many are the lone data scientist or designer sandwiched in between Burberry-clad sales reps.
Crowdfunding is the collective action glue that helps creative class workers around the country band together and fund clothing that feels like pajamas, but are indistinguishable from regular work attire.
For now, Betabrand is a relatively small tech startup that gets substantial media play through stunts that get its overly connected audience excited. The Suitsy officially debuted at the company’s self-titled “Silicon Valley Fashion Week,” which made headlines this week for drones that flew shiny pants down the catwalk.
It’s no surprise then that Betabrand’s penchant for silly trolling stunts needling the traditional fashion establishment make it an easy target for critics. But behind the silliness Herzog says that the fashion industry itself won’t recognize the next generation of fashion, especially from folks who don’t share their values.
“I love a good fashion magazine on a flight. But they’re kind of like the Bible. If you read it literally, you’re not doing it right. They are a great way to learn about what is generally acceptable, and traditions in attire, but something like a Suitsy from a nobody in fashion, that is counterculture to everything they’ve espoused,” he argues.
Herzog is aware of his critics, but eyes a sea change in the culture that will propel the idea of pajama-like clothes into the mainstream of work attire. “When J. Crew says sweat pants are now a fashion item,” he concludes, “that apparently is not the end of fashion.”
The Ferenstein Wire is a syndicated news service. For inquiries, email the editor at greg at greg ferenstein dot com.
The market will take up 100,000 square feet of space, nearly all of the retail space at SuperPier. 
"So for some people it’s plyo, for some people it’s pull-ups, and most certainly it’s the yoga. The yoga is a crusher for a lot of men who’ve never done it before. A lot of big, strong, powerful, fast, athletic dudes - they do that hour and a half yoga class and they feel like absolute neophytes - fitness neophytes. And the smart ones come right back and do it again and again and again."
"I do event after event where people have my programs and know my stuff and have been through several rounds and I’ll look out and there’ll be 2,000 people out there and half of them are men or more and everyone knows up dog from down dog from 
The 1960s were the period of Post-war France, when the country was booming with a newfound sense of optimism and energy. It was the time of New Wave cinema, existentialism,
Each of the 16 Mint seats has at least two outlets. Four of the seats in Mint are actually suites, which have their own doors that can be closed for privacy.
2. Interactive Art:
Artist Martha Araújo invites festivalgoers to put on a velcro suit and jump around on a 
A woman lays beneath a bedazzled 
4. Celebrity Sightings:
5. The Food:
6. The Gift Shop:
SeatGuru.com
.jpg)
