Is it over for the suit? Perhaps I am the wrong person to ask, because over the past couple of months I have found myself wearing one a few days a week. Or rather, wearing several. There’s the fairly classic check – amped up by way of a bolder check on the trouser turn-up – and the black pairing that might be drab if it weren’t for the cropped jacket and wide-leg trews. There’s my newest acquisition, a beauteous Burberry camel affair, that would be the epitome of stealth chic if it weren’t for lines so sharp they helped me scythe my way through the Royal Academy’s summer (sic) party. (Was September the new summer, along with all the other changes we are having to deal with at the moment?)
There’s nothing stealth, however, about my beloved pink suit. You can’t get more newfangled than that. Although, hang on a minute, the recently revealed secret stash of suits belonging to the late Charlie Watts – originally made to measure for that suit-wearer-to-end-all-suit-wearers the Duke of Windsor – included a rosy-fingered duo. A pink suit has long been, in fact, something of a classic for men who dare.
Because that’s the funny thing about the world of tailoring. It’s riven with contradictions. A suit can be conformist, or it can serve to surface its wearer’s non-conformity precisely because it represents a kind of straitjacket. Bending the rules ever so slightly – be it by way of a fabric or cut, or an apparently insignificant detail or three – can actually be a more effective tool of subordination than to ignore the rules entirely. Paul Smith’s cunning reinvigoration of the suit in the 1980s was all about a bright buttonhole here, a crazy lining there. Here was a means to man the barricades from within your corner office. Cunning.
So yes, I like a suit. And I would argue that my present predilection for a cracking two-piece is, in fact, precisely why it isn’t over for the genre. Sure, I initially found myself pulling my long-forgotten double acts off my rails because they felt so other – about as far removed from track pants as it was possible to get.
Then I was reminded that a suit is easy. Put it on. Job done. (The job of getting dressed, that is.) As for your actual employ, a suit semaphors to the world that you are the person to get that job done too. And if your concerns are more off-schedule – if you are dressing for play, not work – a suit will make you appear just as on it if your agenda for the day is cocktails at the Connaught’s new Red Room.
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Something else I have recalled; that if a suit is cut right it can be just as comfy as loungewear. What’s more, unlike loungewear, it immediately makes you look pulled together, not to mention – dare I say it? – powerful.
After all, the origins of the suit were all about a kind of trompe l’oeil, designed to exaggerate the idealised male form, with its broad shoulders (the better to hold up the world) and its slim hips (the better to hunter-gather, not to mention out-shimmy any competitors around the campfire into extinction). For a man to wear great tailoring taps into something primitive, something so primitive that the response it garners from others can be more subconscious than conscious.
For a woman to wear one delivers a more subversive version of similar. The same semantics of dominion are in play, because ours is still largely – for the moment at least – a man’s world. Yet, in another instance of that aforementioned ambidextrousness, there is at the same time nothing more feminising than the right woman in the right suit. It’s a way to play the woman card and the man card hard, to have your cake and eat it, if you will. Scene stealers from Marlene to Meghan have understood that.
