The Great Masculine Renunciation: The History of the Suit You Should Know

In 1930 the British psychologist John Carl Flügel wrote a book on the psychology of clothes and introduced a term that has not lost its accuracy: the Great Masculine Renunciation. That was his name for the turn of the late eighteenth century, when European men gave up lace, silk, powdered wigs and heels within a single generation in favour of dark cloth and a sober cut. From then on, in Flügel's account, a man dresses to be useful and leaves beauty to others. I would argue with half of that sentence, but the date is not arguable.

Before 1800 male fashion trailed the female in neither ambition nor expense. The Versailles of Louis XIV meant hundreds of metres of silk in a single doublet, red heels, powdered faces and wigs weighing kilos. Then came the bourgeoisie, and with it the dark suit as a visual argument: I am busy with something serious. Renouncing ornament became a new form of authority. A dark suit does not say look at me. It says listen to me.

Beau Brummell: the man who is not in the textbooks

George Bryan Brummell was born in 1778 into a clerk's family and, by the standards of English society, was nobody. At twenty-two he was the arbiter of taste for all of London, and his closest friend was the Prince of Wales, the future George IV. His recipe was counterintuitive for the age: absolute simplicity, perfect fit, and quality of cloth in place of gold embroidery. He spent five hours dressing in order to look as though he had spent none.

A detail rarely told. Brummell died in 1840 in poverty in Caen, in France, having spent his last years in an asylum, and none of those he had taught to dress came to his aid. The history of fashion is rarely kind to its inventors. It does, however, keep their rules carefully.

Savile Row: the street where a word was a commitment

The street is named after Lady Dorothy Savile, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had gathered the military tailors. Henry Poole & Co, founded in 1806, dressed Napoleon III and Abraham Lincoln. Gieves & Hawkes, whose history begins in 1771, made uniforms for Admiral Nelson. And it was here that the word bespoke was born: when a client pointed at a roll of cloth, the cloth was said to have been bespoken, and the roll was set aside for him. Today the word is printed on the labels of factory suits. Originally it meant the cloth had been reserved for you before the shears touched it.

What was given up, and what took its place

The inventory is worth making, because the list is shorter than it sounds. Gone were coloured silk, gold-thread embroidery, lace at the cuff and the chest, red heels, the powdered wig and the paint. What stayed was wool cloth, white linen and black. Within two generations a man of means went from wearing his fortune on his back to wearing something that, at ten metres, is indistinguishable from his accountant's.

At ten metres. That is the whole point. The spending did not disappear; it moved. It came off the surface, where anyone can see it, and went inside, where it shows only at close range and only to someone who knows how to look. The fineness of the wool. The whiteness and the press of the linen. The line of the shoulder. The sleeve stopping half a centimetre short of the shirt cuff. The cut of the armhole, which nobody notices and everybody feels when the arm goes up and the jacket does not go up with it.

That is what the renunciation did: it turned men's luxury from something declared into something verified. And it is why a made to measure suit still costs what it costs two hundred years later. You are not paying for what reads from the far end of a room. You are paying for everything that only registers at the distance of a handshake.

The Duke of Windsor: the iconography of the detail

If Brummell invented the rules, Edward VIII, who became Duke of Windsor after the abdication, invented the exceptions. A midnight blue dinner jacket instead of black, because under electric light navy is blacker. Soft shoulders and wide lapels on a double-breasted coat. A tie knot wider than was customary, which is where the Windsor gets its name. The Prince of Wales check, which he wore with a striped shirt. He showed that renouncing ornament does not forbid detail, it forbids the superfluous. The difference is one word, and the whole history of the male wardrobe after 1800 fits inside it.

Three centuries of renunciation: why it matters now

Two hundred years on, a man still dresses according to Flügel. The dark suit remains the only garment that says something important about a man before he opens his mouth, and says it quietly. Hoodies, jeans and video calls have not repealed the rule; they have only made it more visible. When everyone around has renounced even the renunciation, a navy suit is louder than any logo.

There is one point where I part company with Flügel. The noise was renounced; the beauty stayed. Brummell's blue cloth was beautiful. Beauty simply moved from the surface inwards: into the fit, into the cloth, into the way a shoulder sits. That is where it still lives. And that is what people come to an atelier for.

A first made to measure suit should be navy and single-breasted. It is precisely the suit of 1800, with a soft shoulder. It will outlive fashion, as it has outlived everything else.

A dark suit does not say look at me. It says listen to me.ATELIER 23

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