I was halfway through a corporate set in Vienna when it happened. A routine I’d performed dozens of times, clean every time, with a prop I could handle in my sleep. I reached into my jacket pocket for a small item I needed, and the cuff of my jacket sleeve caught on the edge of the pocket. Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. Just a tiny snag that cost me maybe half a second.
But that half second was enough. The timing of the move was disrupted. My hand came out of the pocket a beat late, and instead of a smooth, invisible transition, there was a visible moment of fumbling. The audience probably didn’t notice — or if they did, they didn’t register it as significant. But I noticed. And I spent the next three minutes mentally replaying it instead of being present with the audience.
Here’s the thing: I’d rehearsed that routine hundreds of times. But I’d rehearsed it in a T-shirt in a hotel room. The jacket I was wearing in Vienna was one I’d bought two weeks earlier. It fit well, looked sharp, and I’d tried it on at the store while casually checking that the pockets were accessible. What I hadn’t done was rehearse an entire performance while wearing it. Not once.
That was the night I started rehearsing in my performance clothes.
The Principle Behind the Practice
Ken Weber makes a point in Maximum Entertainment that sounds almost absurdly simple: rehearse in the clothes you’ll perform in. He describes his own practice of doing full run-throughs in his actual performance outfit — shoes, jacket, everything — because the clothes change how you move, and how you move changes the performance.
When I first read this, I mentally filed it under “obvious.” Of course you should know what your clothes feel like. Of course you should check that your pockets work. This wasn’t a revelation; it was common sense.
But common sense and common practice are very different things. The reality is that most of my rehearsal happened in whatever I was wearing at the time — usually casual clothes in a hotel room. T-shirt and jeans. Bare feet on carpet. No jacket, no dress shirt, no performance shoes. The conditions bore almost no resemblance to what I’d actually experience on stage.
And the gap between those conditions mattered far more than I expected.
What a Jacket Actually Does to Your Body
You don’t think about how a jacket constrains your movement until you try to perform in one. A well-fitted jacket — the kind you’d wear to a corporate event — restricts your shoulder rotation. Not dramatically, but enough. Your arms don’t swing the same way. Your elbows don’t extend as freely. The fabric across your upper back pulls when you reach forward. The sleeves ride up or down depending on the cut.
These are tiny constraints. In everyday life, you’d never notice them. You wear a jacket to meetings, to dinners, to conferences, and your body compensates automatically because you’re doing normal things — shaking hands, picking up a glass, gesturing while you talk.
But performance isn’t normal. Performance requires specific, practiced movements executed with precision and confidence. And precision that works in a T-shirt doesn’t automatically transfer to a structured jacket. The margin for error is different. The angles are different. The physical feedback is different.
I discovered this the hard way, not just with the Vienna pocket snag but through a series of small, accumulating mismatches. A reach that felt natural in rehearsal but became slightly awkward with a jacket on. A gesture that had a nice flow in casual clothes but looked stiff when the jacket constrained my shoulders. A prop that I could retrieve smoothly from a jeans pocket but that caught on the lining of dress trousers.
Each individual issue was minor. But minor issues compound. Three or four of them in a single performance create a persistent undertone of discomfort — not visible to the audience as individual problems, but felt by them as a general impression that the performer isn’t quite at ease.
The Shoes Revelation
I’ll admit that the jacket epiphany took a while to fully sink in. The shoe epiphany was faster.
I typically rehearse barefoot or in socks, because I’m usually in a hotel room and it’s comfortable. My performance shoes are leather-soled dress shoes — the kind that look professional and feel fine for standing around at events.
What they don’t feel fine for is moving with intention on a polished floor.
At a show in Salzburg, I stepped forward during an opening bit and felt my foot slide slightly on the hardwood stage. Not a slip, not a stumble — just a lack of the grip I was used to from rehearsing on carpet in socks. My body compensated immediately, but the compensation changed my posture. I stood slightly wider, slightly lower, slightly more cautious. For the rest of the set, I was performing from a physical position I hadn’t rehearsed, on a surface that felt unfamiliar, in shoes that changed my relationship with the ground.
This sounds absurdly granular. It is absurdly granular. And that’s exactly the point. Performance lives in the granular. The audience doesn’t analyze your footwork or notice your posture shift, but they feel the aggregate. A performer who is physically comfortable and confident reads differently from one who is making constant micro-adjustments. The comfort radiates. The discomfort does too.
After Salzburg, I started rehearsing in my actual performance shoes, on surfaces as close to what I’d encounter on stage as I could manage. It felt silly the first few times — walking to the hotel room mirror in dress shoes, running through routines in full stage attire at 11 p.m. in a Marriott. But the difference was immediate. The first time I performed after rehearsing that way, my body knew the shoes. My feet knew the relationship with the floor. I wasn’t adapting on the fly. I was doing what I’d practiced.
Pockets Are Not Pockets Are Not Pockets
Here’s a detail I never thought about until it cost me: pockets vary enormously between garments, and the variation matters.
The breast pocket of one jacket sits half an inch higher than another. The side pockets of dress trousers have a different angle and depth than casual ones. Some jacket pockets have internal flaps that catch on objects when you try to retrieve them quickly. Some trouser pockets are cut tighter than you’d expect, requiring a slightly different hand angle to access smoothly.
When you rehearse in casual clothes, you develop muscle memory for a specific set of pocket dimensions, angles, and resistances. When you perform in different clothes, every pocket is slightly different. Your hand goes in at the practiced angle and meets unexpected friction. Your fingers reach for something at the practiced depth and it’s not quite where you expected.
These are millisecond adjustments. Your body handles them without conscious thought. But handling them without conscious thought means your body is doing something different from what it practiced, and “different from what it practiced” is the definition of improvisation. And improvisation in physical handling is where visible fumbling lives.
I now know the exact dimensions and behavior of every pocket in every outfit I might perform in. I know which jacket pocket has the tighter opening. I know which trousers have the shallower side pockets. I know which shirt has a breast pocket that’s slightly too high for comfortable access. I’ve rehearsed with each of them specifically.
Is this obsessive? Absolutely. Does it matter? Every single time.
The Collar and the Cuff
Two more details, because they illustrate how far down this rabbit hole goes.
Collars. A dress shirt with a structured collar restricts your head movement slightly compared to a T-shirt or a soft casual shirt. When you look down at your hands during a routine, the collar presses against the back of your neck. When you turn your head sharply to address an audience member, the collar guides the turn slightly differently. These are barely perceptible changes, but they affect your physical presence. A performer whose head movements are natural and unrestricted looks more relaxed than one making constant micro-adjustments to compensate for a collar they’re not used to.
Cuffs. Shirt cuffs, particularly French cuffs with cufflinks, change the feel of your wrists. They add weight. They change the visual line of your forearm. They restrict your wrist rotation by a degree or two. If you’re accustomed to rehearsing with bare forearms or rolled-up sleeves, the addition of a structured cuff is a real physical change that your hands need to accommodate.
I started doing what I now think of as “clothing rehearsals” — full run-throughs of my set in the specific outfit I’ll be wearing. Not just a quick check in the mirror. A full rehearsal, from opening to close, treating the clothes as part of the performance equipment. Because they are.
The Broader Principle
The clothes thing is really just one application of a broader principle: rehearse under conditions as close to performance conditions as possible. Every variable that differs between your rehearsal and your performance is a potential source of friction. And friction compounds.
In my consulting work, we call this “fidelity testing.” When you’re designing a new process or system, you test it under conditions that match the real environment as closely as possible. You don’t test a factory floor process in a quiet office. You don’t test a customer-facing procedure without actual customers. The higher the fidelity of your testing, the fewer surprises you encounter in deployment.
Performance is the same. The closer your rehearsal conditions match your performance conditions, the fewer adjustments you need to make in real time. And the fewer adjustments you need to make, the more of your attention is free for the thing that actually matters: connecting with the audience.
This is what it all comes back to. Every bit of preparation, every rehearsal decision, every detail you account for in advance — it’s all in service of freeing up your conscious mind during the performance. When your body knows the clothes, knows the shoes, knows the pockets, knows the physical constraints — it handles all of that automatically. And when the physical handling is automatic, you can be fully present. You can look at the audience instead of worrying about a sleeve. You can read the room instead of managing your footwork. You can be a performer instead of an operator.
The Hotel Room Protocol
These days, when I arrive at a hotel room before a performance, the first thing I do after checking in is unpack my performance clothes and do a full run-through. Not a technical practice session — I’ve done those already. A performance rehearsal. Full outfit. Shoes on. Jacket buttoned. Everything as it will be on stage.
I run through the entire set, paying attention to how the clothes feel, how the pockets respond, whether anything catches or restricts. If something is off, I have time to adjust — swap a jacket, change the pocket I’m using for a particular item, alter a move to accommodate a different sleeve length.
This takes maybe forty-five minutes. It’s the least exciting part of my preparation routine. There’s nothing creative about it. There’s no problem-solving, no artistic refinement. It’s pure logistics, pure physical calibration.
And it’s one of the most valuable things I do.
Because when I walk out in front of an audience, I’m not wearing clothes I’ve just put on. I’m wearing clothes I’ve performed in. The jacket isn’t a constraint I’m managing — it’s a tool I’ve integrated. The shoes aren’t a variable I’m compensating for — they’re a known quantity. The pockets aren’t mysteries — they’re mapped territory.
The audience never knows any of this. They don’t see the hotel room rehearsal, the forty-five minutes of running through material in dress shoes on hotel carpet. They just see a performer who looks comfortable. Who moves naturally. Who doesn’t fumble or adjust or hesitate.
They see what looks like ease. And ease — the appearance of it, the feeling it creates in the room — is what rehearsal in the right clothes buys you.
It took a sleeve catching on a pocket in Vienna to teach me that. I’m grateful it only took the once.