What Does It Mean to Be Overdressed Now?

For most of my life, being overdressed was the smaller of two mistakes. Show up underdressed and you had slighted the host. Show up overdressed and you had only embarrassed yourself, which everyone agreed was the safer way to get it wrong. The rule I grew up hearing was simple: nobody ever got turned away for wearing a jacket.

I still believe that rule. I just don't think it answers the question anymore.

Effort is still a gift

None of that makes overdressing a mistake. Clothes are one of the few ways to tell a host, before you've said a word, that you took the evening seriously. Someone spent the afternoon cooking, or booked the table weeks out, or planned the wedding for a year. Dressing for that is a small, visible thank-you. Most hosts notice, even when they're in jeans themselves.

Where it goes wrong is when the clothes stop being about the room. There's a difference between dressing up for an occasion and dressing up at it. I made the same case about manners in The Best Manners Are Usually Invisible: the effort that works hardest is usually the effort you don't see.

Dressing up at people

Acting class taught me a version of this. A costume exists to serve the scene. If the audience spends the second act staring at an actor's hat instead of listening to what he's saying, the costume has failed, however good the hat is. Clothes at a dinner party work the same way. The outfit that needs explaining, or that pulls every conversation back to the person wearing it, is doing the job of a prop in a scene that belongs to someone else.

The version I watch for in myself is quieter. It's dressing up as a way of standing slightly apart: a sharper jacket than the room calls for, worn partly so people know I know better. That has nothing to do with respect for the host. It's a small verdict on everyone else's choices, and people feel it even when nobody says a word. I wrote more about that instinct in On Restraint, if it sounds familiar.

Fragrance has the same failure, which is probably why I noticed it. A good scent is something a person standing close to you picks up. Too much of it reaches the far end of the room before you do, and at that point the scent is making an announcement on your behalf. Overdressing is the visual version of overspraying.

When the room asks for more, not less

Some rooms invert the whole calculation. A few of my friends run in the Burning Man crowd, where a plain blazer reads as underdressed, not overdressed. That room expects rings, bracelets, a neckerchief, a hat with some personality, patterns and buttons that say something about who's wearing them. Restraint isn't the virtue there. Commitment is. Showing up in a blazer and nothing else to a room like that is its own way of missing the assignment, just pointed in the other direction. The rule underneath both extremes is the same one: read what the room is actually asking for, then meet it, whether that means quieter than you'd default to or considerably louder.

Reading the room before you dress

Most invitations already tell you more than people give them credit for. "Black tie" and "black tie optional" describe two different evenings, not two versions of the same one. Emily Post's own attire guide draws the line plainly: black tie calls for a tuxedo for men, and for women a floor-length gown, a dressy cocktail dress, or their dressiest little black dress, while black tie optional lets a dark suit stand in for the tuxedo. "Cocktail" generally sits below both, calling for a suit or a cocktail dress rather than formalwear. An invitation that names no code at all is telling you something too. It usually means the host expects you to match the venue and the hour rather than a fixed standard.

A question I get from friends in club-and-lodge circles: does a club tie or a lodge tie stand in for the black bow tie. It doesn't, by the traditional rule. Black tie calls for a black silk bow tie, not a long tie in any pattern; a bow tie that also matches the lapel facing is a tailoring refinement, not the rule itself. A club or lodge tie belongs with a suit, at the club function or the lodge meeting itself, not at a black-tie dinner. The one exception is when the organization sets its own dress code: a lodge, a regiment, or a host that specifies a variant governs its own event. Otherwise, if the tie matters enough to you that you want it seen, wear it to the daytime version of that world and save the tux for what a tux is actually for.

When the wording still leaves you guessing, ask. "What are people wearing?" is a plain question, not an awkward one, and most hosts have already thought about the answer. A venue's own site can settle anything the invitation didn't: a rooftop bar and a chapel don't share a dress code, whatever the hour on the invitation says. Photos from the same event in a past year, when you can find them, often tell you more than any wording ever will.

At work, the floor moved

The workplace had a floor too. Most offices shared a baseline of dressing up, and being overdressed meant going a notch past it. That floor has mostly dropped out. I spent over twenty years in financial services, at JPMorgan, Citi, and Morgan Stanley, and I watched the suit go from uniform to exception in real time. JPMorgan told employees in 2016 that business casual was fine in most day-to-day settings, while client-facing situations and roles like investment banking still called for suits. Goldman Sachs went further in 2019, moving to a firmwide flexible dress code, one of the last places on the Street anyone expected to say so. By then the Patagonia vest over a button-down had already become its own Midtown uniform. Time reported on the trend that same year, by which point Patagonia itself had started limiting which companies could put a logo on one.

So the question changed. When almost nobody dresses up, dressing up stops reading as ordinary effort and starts reading as a statement. People ask whether you have a date later, or an interview, or a funeral. The jacket that once helped you blend in now makes you the most visible person in the room.

That drop in formality also landed unevenly. Susan Scafidi, who runs Fordham Law's Fashion Law Institute, said expensive Wall Street suits had projected power almost like armor, and that women had only just achieved what she called the parity of the pantsuit when the standard began to loosen. When a firm drops that standard, men mostly lose a uniform. Women lose a settled answer to an older question: how to signal authority with no fixed code left to point to. The suit was restrictive, but its professional meaning was widely understood. What replaced it wasn't the absence of a code. It was a code nobody had agreed on out loud, and unwritten codes fall harder on whoever the room already judges more closely.

The one rule with no notch

Every rule above has a comfortable middle to sit in. Overdressed has an easy fix: the jacket comes off. Visibly drunk doesn't have one. No tailoring recovers a night where you can't hold a conversation, or a drink, steady, and nobody remembers what you were wearing anyway. Dress a notch above the room if that's your instinct. Just stay a person the room wants to keep talking to.

A notch above, with a way down

What I do now is dress one notch above what I expect the room to be, and make sure the notch can come off. A jacket instead of a suit, so it can go over the back of a chair if nobody else is wearing one. A tie in the pocket until I see what the room is doing. Good shoes, because they read as care without reading as ceremony. Good socks too, in case the host asks for shoes off at the door. A pocket square is one of the easiest upgrades a plain blazer has, and it comes out just as easily if the room turns out more casual than I guessed. The goal is to arrive a little above the room and be able to meet it within five minutes of walking in.

A dress code is a kindness

Hosts carry half of this equation, and most don't realize it. A vague invitation isn't neutral, it just moves the guessing from you to your guests. Naming a dress code, even loosely, "casual," "dressy casual," "jacket if you'd like one," does more to put people at ease than the menu or the seating chart ever will. The two failures people worry about, a suit at a backyard barbecue or shorts at a dinner party, are almost always failures of communication, not of judgment. I go into hosting etiquette more broadly over on Society of Scents & Spirits.

Shoes-off households raise a version of this that's easy to miss. Asking guests to leave shoes at the door is a reasonable house rule, but it puts everyone's socks on display, and not everyone dresses for that. A basket of clean slippers by the door, the kind a hotel hands out, solves it without anyone having to explain a hole or a mismatched pair. It's a small gesture, and it's usually the one guests remember.

So what does it mean now?

Being overdressed used to mean misreading the dress code. Now that many rooms no longer have a clear one, it means something narrower: dressing in a way that makes other people feel underdressed, or that turns the evening toward you. Dressing a notch above the room is still fine, and usually kind. The mistake is dressing in a way that asks the room to look at you.

I still reach for the jacket more often than not. I've only stopped treating it as armor. If I turn out to be the only one wearing it, it goes on the back of the chair, and I get on with dinner.