The Perfect Suit
BBC Four
The young art critic Alastair Sooke proved the perfect presenter for The Perfect Suit, not because he knew about lounge suits but because he didn’t. He has bought only one in his life, for his wedding. But ignorance can be a good place to start, and so it proved. Entering Savile Row dressed in a jumper, he took Tom Wolfe’s advice to me but in reverse. Wolfe said that he dressed in a suit — if not his famous white linen one — on his toughest journeys into counterculture on the ground that his interviewees would assume that he knew nothing and therefore explain everything.
He wanted to square the circle, or perhaps the shoulders, of the paradox that a “suit” is both a metonym for boring man and, cf The Rat Pack, Bryan Ferry and Mad Men, a wardrobe’s coolest item. It is protective armour yet the male’s mating display (a wonderful old Burton’s advert showed a cheaply suited man observed from across a lawn: “What a nice boyfriend to have!”). The uniform of Parliamentary lobby fodder today, a lounge suit was an act of rebellion when donned by Keir Hardie in 1892 as he took his seat in a Commons dressed in frock coats.
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Sooke’s inquiries took him to the Roxy Music designer Antony Price, Sir Paul Smith and the Hungarian factory where suits with the trappings of bespoke are knocked up by the thousand. But the mutability of the apparently enduring lounge suit was covered by only two visits, one to a traditional North London tailor and the other to Topman. In Islington Charlie Allen told Sooke, correctly, that you never do up all the buttons on a suit jacket and that four buttons was optimal on a cuff. Rules, rules, rules.
Gordon Richardson, who serves customers aged 17-30 at Topman, maintained that the perfect suit was the rule-breaking one of the moment. Soon Sooke was squeezing into a narrow-shouldered high-armpitted number that he could not button. The truth is that, after the baggy Armani years, suits are now cut too tightly. But that’s fashion and seeing Sooke dressed so sharply that he might die of lung constriction made me hate my own deeply uncomfortable wedding suit, made “bespoke” by Sartoriani of Savile Row, a little less. The Perfect Suit could have rummaged deeper for its sociological insights. But it suited me, sir.
Jo Frost: Extreme Parental Guidance
Channel 4
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Jo Frost returned in a format so crowded with ways to impart parenting skills that it may trigger attention deficit disorder. On Extreme Parental Guidance, Supernanny’s advice boiled down, as it always does, to flattering your children by honouring your threats to them. More interestingly, it suggested that children today may be harder to raise not because we fuss over their whims but because we deprive them of attention and they demand it back in the most disruptive ways. The average time parents interact with their children is, apparently, 49 minutes a day. Could the attention that is currently deficit be ours?