In the spring of 1970, in a Manhattan loft, a twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn-born designer named Jerry Rosengarten was working on a problem set by his clients at Lee Jeans. The Kansas-based pants maker had begun receiving samples of a new fabric, polyester double-knit, from DuPont’s textile-fiber division. The fabric had been developed for women’s pant suits, but Lee wanted to find a way to put it in front of American men. Rosengarten took the brief and made a shape that did not exist in American menswear at the time: a shirt-style jacket, unlined, with patch pockets and contrast topstitching, paired with matching flat-front trousers. He did not call it a suit because it was not a suit in the architectural sense. There was no canvas chest piece, no shoulder pad, no waistband construction. It was a pair of garments cut to be worn together, manufactured by sewing machine in one operation, washed in a domestic washing machine, hung to dry, and never sent to a dry cleaner. Lee bought the design and put it into production. The first units appeared in stores in late 1970 under the brand name LEEsures.
By 1975 the same shape, now called the leisure suit, was the fastest-growing men’s clothing category in American retail. By 1979 it was at the center of one of the most-watched movies of the decade and on the back of one of the most-recognized actors in the world. By 1982 it was a punchline. The leisure suit was not just a suit. It was the first mass-market American men’s silhouette designed for the home washing machine, and the moment wool stopped being the default fabric of the American workweek.
The Peacock Revolution
In the second half of the 1960s, American men had begun to wear color. The shift had a name. Ernest Dichter, the Austrian-born consumer psychologist who had invented modern market research, called it the Peacock Revolution in 1965. The Esquire columnist George Frazier picked the phrase up in his 1968 columns and made it stick. What both men were describing was the visible dismantling of a uniform that had held for sixty years: charcoal or gray three-piece suit, white shirt, dark tie, black shoes, hat optional. Carnaby Street in London had been doing the dismantling since the early 1960s through bespoke Mod tailoring. The American version had been doing it through Pierre Cardin’s collarless men’s collection, Yves Saint Laurent’s safari jacket, and the slow infiltration of color, pattern, and unstructured construction into department-store windows.
By the time Rosengarten was sketching the LEEsures jacket, the Peacock Revolution had won the cultural argument. American men were willing to wear color, pattern, and looser silhouettes. What they were not yet willing to do was pay British tailoring prices for the experience. Mod tailoring was bespoke Savile Row or Carnaby Street, hand-finished, priced at multiple hundred dollars. Cardin and Saint Laurent were couture-level. The Peacock Revolution was a cultural permission slip waiting for a mass-market American answer. Rosengarten and the textile mills behind him had it.
DuPont’s Polyester
The fabric was older than the shape. Polyester had been developed by British chemists John Whinfield and James Dickson at the Calico Printers’ Association in 1941, commercialized by ICI as Terylene starting in 1946. DuPont bought the American rights and launched its own polyester fiber, Dacron, in 1950, marketing it publicly from 1951 onward as a miracle fabric that could be worn for sixty-eight consecutive days without wrinkling. Through the 1950s and 1960s polyester moved through American homes as curtains, upholstery, sheets, and women’s blouses. In men’s tailoring it remained a marginal blend ingredient. Wool, with its seventy-some-year tradition of American suit production behind it, was still the default.
The shift came from the double-knit loom. A double-knit polyester fabric is produced on a circular knitting machine that interlocks yarns on two beds simultaneously, producing a stable, thick, stretchy textile that holds its shape and resists creasing. Burlington Industries, the largest American textile producer, was headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, with most of its mills along the North Carolina-South Carolina textile belt. Burlington had been slow to move into knits, and the company’s president Eli Callaway spent the late 1960s retooling worsted plants for double-knit production over internal resistance. In September 1970, the same year Rosengarten designed the LEEsures, Burlington opened a demonstration mill in North Carolina built to show the public how double-knit polyester moved from petroleum through spinneret, dye vat, and knitting machine to finished fabric. By early 1971, Burlington had committed seven million dollars to a national promotion of the new fabric. Callaway was forced out by the divisional faction of the company in 1973, but the knit business he had built recovered the company’s revenue through the rest of the decade.
The cost story was the part that mattered to the customer. A traditional wool suit in 1970 retailed for between one hundred and two hundred dollars in American department stores. A LEEsures double-knit polyester set retailed for under fifty dollars. By 1973, JCPenney and Sears were each selling polyester double-knit suits at price points starting around thirty-five dollars. For a working-class or middle-class American man, the polyester suit was a quarter to a third the price of the wool equivalent, lasted longer between wears, and did not require a dry-cleaning round trip every other month. The math made the conversion.
JCPenney, Sears, Haggar
The American department store made the leisure suit a category. The Sears Roebuck catalog, JCPenney’s, and Montgomery Ward each ran multi-page leisure suit spreads in their men’s sections by 1973. The pages featured the suits in earth tones, pastels, and bold plaids, often photographed on models with feathered hair and open-collared printed polyester shirts. Lee, who had originated the form, expanded into men’s, boys’, and big-and-tall versions through the mid-1970s. Haggar, the Dallas men’s slacks manufacturer, became the largest dedicated player by mid-decade. By 1975, Merriam-Webster added the term leisure suit to the dictionary, dated to that year.
The American man who bought a leisure suit was not the cultural figure who would later be lampooned in retrospect. He was, more often than not, a thirty-five-year-old insurance adjuster in Akron, a forty-two-year-old electrician in Tampa, a twenty-eight-year-old salesman in Phoenix. He bought one for a cousin’s wedding in 1973, another for a department softball league banquet in 1975, a third for his daughter’s high school graduation in 1977. By the middle of the decade, leisure suits accounted for an estimated thirty to forty percent of men’s suit sales in American mass-market retail. The wool suit business, which had held since the late nineteenth century as the default men’s purchase, was losing market share at a pace it had never seen, and would never recover from.
Travolta’s White Suit
On December 14, 1977, Robert Stigwood’s production of Saturday Night Fever opened in American theaters. Director John Badham had given costume designer Patrizia von Brandenstein a small budget and a specific instruction: buy everything off the rack from real Brooklyn stores, because the character of Tony Manero, the nineteen-year-old paint store clerk played by John Travolta, could not be dressed in custom-tailored film costumes. Von Brandenstein walked Times Square and Brooklyn with cast member Paul Pape and bought the wardrobe at small menswear shops. The film’s most-photographed costume, the white three-piece polyester suit Travolta wore in the dance-floor finale to “More Than a Woman,” was purchased for approximately one hundred dollars at a Brooklyn menswear store. It was a leisure-suit-adjacent silhouette, slightly more tailored than a Lee LEEsures, with a single-breasted notch-lapel jacket, a five-button matching waistcoat, and flared flat-front trousers. The fabric was one hundred percent polyester.
The film grossed two hundred and thirty-seven million dollars worldwide on a budget of three and a half million, became one of the highest-grossing films of 1977, and made Travolta the most photographed twenty-three-year-old in America. The white suit went on the cover of Time, onto the soundtrack album sleeve that would sell more than forty million copies, and into the visual vocabulary of every disco club in the country. Patrizia von Brandenstein, who had bought the suit for one hundred dollars in Bay Ridge, would go on to become the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Art Direction, for Amadeus, in 1985. The actual Saturday Night Fever suit, decades later, sold at Julien’s Auctions for two hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
The Travolta suit was both the apex of the leisure-suit silhouette and the moment it began to die. After 1977, the leisure suit became a costume in a movie about working-class Brooklyn Italians who lived in Bay Ridge and dreamed of a dance-floor escape. It was no longer just clothing. It was a costume associated with a specific cultural moment, and as that moment passed, the silhouette went with it. By 1980, the disco backlash was in full retreat. By 1982, the leisure suit was already shorthand for bad taste and a decade lost. Some upscale American restaurants began posting signs forbidding it. The fabric that had made the silhouette possible, polyester, became a punchline alongside it.
The Death of Wool
The leisure suit died. The wool suit did not come back. That is the part of the story that matters.
Through the early 1980s, the American man’s wardrobe converted to wool-blend, not pure wool. The 1980s power suit, the Armani-influenced silhouette worn by Wall Street and Hollywood, was structured wool-blend with synthetic interlining and synthetic chest canvas. The 1990s introduced casual Friday, then casual Thursday, then a casual workweek. The 2000s ended the suit as a workweek default in most American white-collar professions. The 2010s and 2020s made the suit a wedding-and-funeral garment for the majority of American men under fifty. The leisure suit’s death did not return the wool suit to its 1960s share of the American man’s wardrobe. It removed the suit category from the American man’s wardrobe in stages.
Polyester, meanwhile, did not die. It expanded. Modern microfibers are polyester. Athleisure is polyester. The performance fabric used in nearly every casual American garment manufactured today is a polyester variant. The fiber DuPont commercialized in 1950 and Burlington wove into double-knit in 1970 is now the dominant fiber in the global apparel industry. The leisure suit was the moment polyester won the American men’s market. The market then changed shape so the suit no longer mattered, but the fabric kept going.
The wool suit needed a tailor. The Mod Suit needed Savile Row. The Leisure Suit needed a sewing machine and a polyester loom. By 1979 every American department store sold all three. By 1985 they sold none of them. The 1980s power suit was wool-blend. The 1990s dropped the jacket. The 2000s dropped the suit. The leisure suit died, but wool tailoring never came back.