Cracking the L.A.-NY dress code

Wear a suit and tie in L.A.? I suppose it's still the norm in certain pockets of the city, especially downtown, but for the most part isn't it a bit... well, ridiculous? The WSJ's Christina Binkley gets into the whole L.A. vs. NY, khaki vs. pinstripe thing for her Fashion Journal column. She writes that New Yorkers often miss the subtle power signals in Beverly Hills, "where a man's single-breasted suit and tie indicates that he's not the most powerful guy in the room: He's a worker bee - somebody's accountant or agent. Nothing wrong with that - unless he's aiming higher." It works the other way, too; New Yorkers will judge you a rube if you walk into many a meeting with a blazer and light slacks (summer Fridays being the possible exception). So why does any of this matter? You know why - because people are simply more comfortable being around their own, or at least folks who look like their own.

For women, trendy clingy fabrics and trapeze summer dresses can look on-the-mark on the West Coast but overly casual for an East Coast workday. In L.A., a woman decides to wear hose, whereas in Washington, D.C., she decides not to wear them. These differing sensibilities are why Azzedine Alaia, a designer known for his sexy figure-hugging women's ready-to-wear, is bigger on the West Coast than the East, says Susan Dresner, a New York wardrobe-management consultant whose clients tend to be professional women. Ann Taylor is bigger in the East, she says, for the same reason. "New York is more smart, go-to-work," she says. "L.A. is more body-conscious."

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Brian Koppelman, the New York-based producer/screenwriter behind Ocean's Thirteen, Rounders and The Illusionist, lives in two worlds simultaneously. In L.A.-style screenwriter mode at his office, Mr. Koppelman wears Air Jordan T-shirts and his favorite John Fluevog shoes. As a dad in Manhattan, he wears a suit to functions at his children's private school. "If I'm in the New York world that way, I will dress right so as not to embarrass my kids," he says. As near as I can tell, the last restaurant in L.A. to require gentlemen to wear jackets was L'Orangerie, and it's closed now. This helps explain why Mr. Koppelman was warned to include wardrobe clues when inviting a well-known Los Angeles film producer to dine at New York's Café Boulud recently. When he proposed inviting the producer to join them, a mutual friend responded by email: "Love for him to come. Tell him to dress decently."