Men's Vested Suits
3 Piece suits.
Men Suits Discount
Classic as well as Utilitarian, the Three-Piece
Suit
Is Back--But Did It Ever Really Leave?
By G. Bruce Boyer
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The fashion runways are awash in
fake suede pants, rhinestone tennis bracelets and polyurethane
T-shirts--and that's on the male models! You might actually think
that some of these
men wear
designers weren't even interested in clothes. But don't mistake
dubious taste for lack of interest. Well, never mind. For the rest
of us who have managed to resist those frighteningly trendy,
disk-driven looks, what's fashionable at the moment, perhaps as a
rather strong reaction to all that blather about casual business
attire in the media a few seasons ago, is a strong showing of high
tailoring. Sartoria, the fashion press call it. We've always merely
called it good suits.
What is particularly
attention-getting is the three-piece suit. This time around in the
low-keyed medium of luxury worsteds and flannels.
Not that the
three piece suit has ever really been out of fashion for very
long. The Second World War did put fabric for civilian use in short
supply, and suits were pared to spareness: no cuffs, no flaps, no
double breasted suits were the patriotic ideal, and two-piece
single-breasted suits quickly became the order of the day. That
sumptuary mood carried over for perhaps another decade, until the
mid-1950s. Apart from that glitch, the three-piece suit's history
has been surprisingly stable in this century.
But the three piece suit's history
began long before 1900. Its history began, and we can be fairly
precise about this, on Oct. 7, 1666. For almost three centuries
until that date, as it happened, men were in the habit of wearing
doublet and breeches, shirt underneath, cloak on top--the accepted
masculine costume between the medieval and modern world. But on the
afternoon of Oct. 8, 1666, the English diarist and secretary to the
British Navy Samuel Pepys (himself, coincidentally, a tailor's son)
was in Westminster Hall, the principal meeting place for English
government officials in London, when he heard some surprising news
about a resolution made the previous day by King Charles II:
The King hath yesterday in council
declared his resolution of setting a fashion for clothes, which he
will never alter. It will be a vest, I know not well how.
On a memorable Monday just a week
later, Pepys went to Westminster Hall again, to see the king strut
out in his new finery: This day the King begins to put on his Vest,
and I did see several persons of the House of Lords, and Commons
too, great courtiers, who are in it--being a long Cassocke close to
the body, of black cloth and pinked with white silk under it, and a
coat over it, and the legs ruffled with black riband like a pigeon's
leg--and upon the whole, I wish the King may keep it, for it is a
very fine and handsome garment.
The style caught on quicker than
you can say Giorgio Armani, it being perhaps politically impolite to
resist a royal imprimatur, and Pepys went out double-quick to order
a vest and coat for himself from his own tailor. It was delivered on
Nov. 4.: Comes my Taylors man in the morning and brings my vest
home, and coat to wear with it, and belt and silver-hilted sword. So
I rose and dressed myself, and I like myself mightily in it, and so
doth my wife. Then being dressed, to church.
What is fascinating about this
outfit--apart from the tailor delivering it in barely three weeks,
when nowadays it seems to take at least twice that--is that,
originally, the coat was shorter than the
vest. Over the years the vest has shrunk, until it reached its
present position--ending approximately at the waistline--at the end
of the eighteenth century. From that point on, coats began to shrink
as well, until around 1880, when the "lounge" coat--a jacket that
just covered the buttocks--was introduced, and began to replace the
longer frock coat for business dress. When the First World War ended
and men returned to civilian dress, it was to this short
coat-vest-and-trousers business uniform they adhered.
By the 1930s virtually all of the
silhouette variations seen today in the three-piece suit had already
manifested themselves: natural shouldered or padded coats;
single breasted or double-breasted; seamless or postboy
waistcoats; flared, pegged, straight or tapered trousers. A wider or
narrower lapel here, a slightly different pocket treatment there is
what we're accustomed to when we think of changes in the suit.
So, with a few technical
innovations, the three-piece suit, single- or double-breasted, has
remained basically the same for more than a hundred years. Its
success is due undoubtedly to providing a universally flattering
shape amenable to almost any specific wearer. A perfectly
democratic, utilitarian, business costume. And we men like it that
way. Women's hemlines can go from here to there in a season, and the
whole silhouette and stance can change radically from one season to
the next. Men's
clothing, being much more subtle, changes in quarter inches.
It's not that men are not in the
fashion game, but rather that, in business clothes, God is very much
more in the details. At the moment,
tailored clothing seems to have struck a moderate balance,
midway between the wide-bodied, shouldered look and the hanging
lines of the sack suit. The suit of the moment has subtle shaping,
low but slightly extended shoulders, and some flair in the skirt of
the jacket. Trousers are full-cut, but with a slight taper. The
details are decidedly British. Side vents and ticket pockets are on
both single- and double-breasted coats. Vests often have lapels and
flaps over the lower set of pockets, and with either a five- or
six-button front, depending on whether a man wants a higher or lower
gorge to show more or less necktie.
With a six-button front, the
bottom button is usually left undone (the English tailors call it an
"idle" button). Supposedly this practice began when the British king
Edward VII grew too large a stomach to close the last button, and
other gentlemen of his company slavishly followed the example,
whether out of courtesy or because Edward was such a style setter
they thought it an appealing touch. Whatever the impetus, the
fashion caught on quickly, and leaving the bottom button idle is
still considered de rigueur for fastidious dressers. In The Road To
Wigan Pier (1937), George Orwell, rather sneeringly I'm afraid,
reminded his readers of the English class-consciousness of such
idiosyncrasies of dress: Comrade X, it so happens, is an old Etonian.
He would be ready to die on the barricades, in theory anyway, but
you notice that he still leaves his bottom waistcoat button undone.
Aficionados of the three-piece
suit point to its dressiness and unifying aesthetic, as well as to
the obvious practicality of a vest easily covering a slightly
wrinkled shirt, and having an extra number of pockets in which to
carry the various accoutrements of a gentleman: cigar cutter,
lighter, etc. But the real advantage of the three-piece suit has
always been that the additional vest provides added warmth in cooler
weather. We all seem to be traveling more and more, and as we hop
from Hamburg to Haifa, New York to Naples, crisscrossing time zones
and climes in our global neighborhoods, packing proper clothes
becomes a serious problem. What better than a light-to-mid-weight
worsted three-piece?
If
suits have
evolved at all in the past 100 years, it's been in the area of
comfort. The modern suit found itself initially saddled with the
Victorian idea that dignity was somehow antithetical to personal
comfort, and consequently suits were stiff, heavy, cumbersome
uniforms; all thick, scratchy wool guaranteed to get respect--like
an iron maiden is bound to elicit respect from a prospective tenant.
Today's deluxe superfine worsteds,
flannels and even tweeds are half the weight they used to be, and,
along with thoughtful tailoring, make the three-piece suit lighter
and more supple than ever. Even the most-formal striped beauty has
an easy self-assurance that its father and grandfather could only
dream of. *
A frequent contributor to Cigar
Aficionado on the subject of fashion, G. Bruce Boyer is the author
of Eminently Suitable.
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