History of the Men's Suit: From Beau Brummell to Today

In 1802 George Bryan Brummell, a clerk's son with no title and no fortune, walked onto Bond Street in a navy tailcoat, a white shirt with a starched collar, and breeches that fitted as nothing in London had fitted before. He spent hours dressing and looked as though he had not thought about clothes for a minute. A year later the Prince of Wales dressed that way, ten years later all of Europe, two hundred years later us. Everything now called the history of the men's suit begins on that morning.

One thing interests me most in this story. Brummell invented nothing: navy cloth, white linen and boots all existed before him. What he invented was the rule that a well-dressed man is a man nobody notices. He is credited with the line that if people turn in the street, you are wrongly dressed. In two hundred years that rule has outlived every fashion, and at the atelier I repeat it more often than any other.

The lounge suit: a house garment that went to work

By the middle of the nineteenth century a frock coat was worn by day and a tailcoat in the evening, and both were solemn and uncomfortable. A jacket and trousers in the same cloth appeared in the England of the 1850s as clothing for leisure at a country house: billiards, a walk, Sunday lunch. Hence the name, lounge suit, the suit for the drawing room. To wear it in town at first meant roughly what turning up to a board meeting in jeans would mean now.

Then what happens to all comfortable things happened. First it was allowed in the office, then in parliament, and by the twenties it was the only clothing of a working man, from banker to reporter, while the frock coat retreated to wedding hire. There was no decree. The garment was so exact that no alternative was left.

Savile Row: the street where the look of authority was decided

A London street less than half a kilometre long changed the male wardrobe more than any catwalk, and it did so by disagreeing with itself rather than by agreeing. Anderson & Sheppard cut soft, un-London jackets for Fred Astaire and were said to make the most comfortable coat on the Row. Huntsman still builds its one-button coat with a high armhole and a narrow shoulder that makes a man stand up straighter. Dege & Skinner came out of military tailoring and it shows in every shoulder they cut. There is no single British style: there are a dozen readings of one approach, and almost everything now called classic tailoring came out of that argument between neighbours.

That approach is called structure. A wide, slightly raised shoulder, a defined chest, a waist. Inside the jacket is a canvas of horsehair and wool, built in layers and sewn by hand: it holds the shape even when the jacket is off and lying on a chair, and after some months of wear it takes the shape of its owner. Where the word bespoke came from, and what these houses have to do with the renunciation of the eighteenth century, is told in the great masculine renunciation.

The Neapolitan reversal

While London built the suit like a building, Naples did the opposite. At the beginning of the twentieth century Neapolitan tailors took out the rigid interlinings and cut a jacket that lies on the body like a shirt. Hence the spalla camicia, the shirt shoulder: the sleeve is set with small gathers, without a pad, and the cloth moves as the man moves. Kiton assembles a jacket from twenty-five pieces, each taking up to twenty-five hours of one craftsman's handwork. Cesare Attolini are credited with what is now called the unstructured jacket.

Why do factory suits that imitate British structure with glue lose their shape in a season. Why does a soft Neapolitan jacket cost more when there is less inside it. Why does it look better with each year. Because in it the cloth and the tailor's hand are doing the work, and glue has nothing to work with. Our suits are made on the Neapolitan principle, with a soft shoulder and a light canvas, at our own workshop in the Serra da Estrela.

The sixties: when the suit nearly died

By the end of the sixties it seemed the suit had no future. Jeans, anti-conformism, an unwillingness to dress like one's father. Pierre Cardin showed a collarless fitted jacket in 1960, Hardy Amies narrowed the British line, and in 1975 Giorgio Armani released a collection of soft, deconstructed jackets, with no horsehair and no shoulder pads, that could be worn with jeans. In 1980 Richard Gere walked through American Gigolo in them, and the world's view of the suit changed over one weekend.

That is how Neapolitan softness reached Hollywood by way of Milan, and from there every shop in the world. The suit did not die. It took the shoulder pads out.

What happened to the suit in the twenty-first century

In the two thousands it looked as though informality had won outright: Silicon Valley made the hoodie a status garment, offices abolished dress codes, and casual Friday spread across the week. Something else happened. Once suits stopped being worn by everyone, the men who kept wearing them became more visible than ever. The suit turned from a sign of conformity into a sign of decision.

Today the best suits are no longer made only in London and Naples. Japan's Ring Jacket has mastered the Neapolitan technique better than many Italians, and young ateliers in Lisbon and Warsaw make garments that can stand beside the Row without embarrassment. The geography has widened; the requirements have not changed: canvas, cloth, hand.

What this history says about your next order

Cut matters more than a label. Brummell dressed at tailors whose names nobody recorded and was the best-dressed man at court. A well-cut suit in plain wool always beats a badly cut one in expensive cloth.

Structure or softness is a choice without a hierarchy. The British and Neapolitan schools answer the same question differently, and the choice follows the life you lead: a man who travels and sits all day is better off in the soft one.

Canvas matters more than the label. A jacket with hand-sewn canvas lasts fifteen to twenty years; a fused one delaminates in three to five. It is worth asking before buying, because after the first dry clean it is too late.

Fit is eighty per cent of the result. Sleeve, waist, length. A shop suit is always altered; a made to measure suit is built on the body from the start, and that is where the difference in price and in comfort lies.

The suit outlived two world wars, jeans, hoodies and video calls because it answers a problem nothing else answers: it says something important about a man before he has opened his mouth. When we make a made to measure suit, that is what we are thinking about. The negotiation, a friend's wedding, and the meeting you do not yet know about.

A well-dressed man is a man nobody notices. The rule is two hundred years old.ATELIER 23

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