Where Style Becomes Costume

Dressing in the full traditions of men’s clothing can make one a caricature. It must be combined with a touch of originality.

There are blogs on men’s style that are fascinating for the depth of knowledge they demonstrate – over the role of a split yoke on a man’s shirt, over the line of a shoe’s waist. They inform many things about what I buy and what I wear. But I am often a little disappointed when I see images of the authors.

This is because they seem to want to be an embodiment of what is – necessarily – historical dress, and become an illustration from an old copy of Esquire. They take every aspect of, for example, early twentieth century English country wear, and they copy it. They wear the cord trousers, the tweed jacket, the checked shirt and the wool tie. They add the flat cap, the brogues and the bright socks. They may add a hunting jacket with leather padding on the shoulder to protect from the impact of a gun’s recoil, or a waxed Barbour jacket with bellow pockets to accommodate shells.

These items are all correct, historically. And the chances are they will be of the highest quality, complement the wearer’s skin tones and fit him perfectly – as he takes great care over these elements as well. But it is just mimicry. He is in costume.

Even Prince Charles, on a hunt around Balmoral, doesn’t follow the traditions of hunt clothing this fastidiously. And he has an excuse for wearing something similar – he is actually hunting, he is actually English and all his forbears wore similar pieces throughout their history.

The style aficionado who copies it is just dressing up. He has none of the creative element that can make dressing so enjoyable, and so personal.

Let me give an officewear example. I like wearing pinstripe suits. I’m a fan of red socks, as well as double-breasted jackets and patterned handkerchiefs. But I know that if I wore all of these pieces in one combination I would look like a caricature. I might as well top it off with a bowler hat, grow a moustache and wander down Fleet Street twirling my umbrella.

So I wear red socks with more understated suits. Perhaps a plan grey flannel and open-necked white shirt. I rarely wear a handkerchief and a tie at the same time, as for me it is probably a little too much. And my double-breasted suits are not navy-blue pinstripe.

It is also fun to add touches of individuality – to experiment with odd waistcoats in formal suits, though there is no tradition of this that I am aware of; to combine smart clean Converse with wool suits, as I like the contrast of smart and casual; to wear darker coloured, wool handkerchiefs in odd jackets when worn casually. This is individuality and creativity. It is what makes dressing fun, rather than study.

I think that men who are very interested in their clothes are part geeky, petty academic and part creative, artistic aesthete. Everyone needs the former to drive them into reading and investigation, to be interested by the history and traditions of men’s attire. But everyone also needs the latter, to have the kind of mind that created these traditions in the first place. (Beau Brummel and the Duke of Windsor are heroes for being precisely the opposite of these geeky facsimiles.)

Unfortunately, when men have too much of the first influence and not enough of the second, they end up looking like an extra in a costume drama.

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The Great Bottom Button Mystery

Ooo, there’s another one! A perfectly respectable businessman with only the bottom button of his three-button jacket done up. Just the one. Leaving the rest of the jacket flapping open.

It looks so bizarre. It creates an artificial, rippling belly of negative space, and as result is surely the least flattering way to possibly do up the buttons of a suit. Why on earth do they do it?

At first, I thought it was an aberration. One man walking towards me, his pinstripe ruined by a frankly odd buttoning. I briefly wondered why he had decided to do up just that button, and not the natural waist button, the middle button. Briefly I considered it, and then dismissed it – a mistake, an accident, certainly an exception.

Then a few days later it happened again. Someone else striding purposefully along Fleet Street, briefcase in hand, importantly talking into his mobile phone. With only the bottom button done up. This time the buttoning was so low that his tie had flapped over the fastening, like a bright dead fish.

Why? Don’t you see it when you look in the mirror? Doesn’t it strike you as odd, like doing up the top button of your shirt, and no others? Doesn’t the oddity of the effect suggest that the suit was not designed to do that?

As more examples popped up, I began to give the phenomenon serious thought. Why did you never see men with just the top button fastened? There were always a few with the top and the middle, or the middle and the bottom, but the waist button was always firmly secured.

Did the bottom-fasteners somehow feel that this arrangement gave them a deeper V, a plunging, masculine chest? They could be forgiven for thinking that (though still wrong) if the suit had a natural, soft roll. But modern, worsted business suits are true three buttons – the fastening is stiff and, unlike the flannels of old, there is little natural roll. So the artificial belly is the result.

Finally, a combination of curiosity and anger got the better of me and I asked someone. Embarassing, I know. But it was beginning to dominate every waking thought.

The gentleman in question was puzzled, then a little miffed, perhaps a tad embarrassed. He said he did it because it felt like a natural fit for the jacket, it felt snug. And there’s the rub: the jacket was too big for him, so it didn’t feel like it fitted with the waist button done up. The bottom button on its own felt better.

I’ve since found that some men go for the same odd buttoning if the jacket is too small for their belly – the cut of a jacket can mean that the bottom button fits when the middle doesn’t. It all depends on cut and on physique.

Of course, they’re all wrong. It looks silly and it ignores how the jacket was designed to be worn. Any man who wears his jacket buttoned in this way should be told to have it altered.
Fortunately, I have so far resisted the urge to tell any of them this.

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The Double-Breasted Debate

I was always told that a double-breasted suit created breadth. Good for tall, narrow men. Not so good for the short and stout. This belief, though widely held by others, probably originates for me with the insistence of my mother that I would look lovely with a double breast, given that I am tall and could always be broader.

Funny how many opinions of oneself originate with such memories of youth. There’s probably a good case to be made that all one’s fundamental impressions of strength and weakness are formed at that age. When one is more insecure, more vulnerable. I’ve never liked my legs either.

But I digress. The traditional view is that double-breasted makes one broader. Alan Flusser disagrees: he contends that the swooping lapels of a double-breasted jacket, from the tip of a peaked lapel down to two crossed points at the waist, create the illusion of height. This illusion, he argues, more than compensates for the impression of breadth achieved elsewhere.

I can see the sense in his argument, but instinctively disagree. I knew he was wrong, but didn’t know why.

Now I do. Flusser is not wrong in his analysis, just in his conclusion. The answer is spelled out in The Suit by Nicholas Antongiavanni. His chapter Of Diminutive Men agrees that the sweeping lapel of a double-breasted jacket creates height. The double row of buttons and the extra flap of cloth, however, create breadth. Most would argue that the second set of features outweighs the first. But to a certain extent that is a subjective question.

More importantly, there is a solution for the diminutive man. If he wears a single-breasted suit with a low fastening (perhaps even a single button on the waist as preferred by some Savile Row tailors) and peaked lapels, he can achieve some of the slimming effects of a double-breasted jacket. This look, Antongiavanni argues, is rakish. It is unusual and slimming without the conservative or perhaps boxy appearance of the normal double-breasted.

The other solution is to go for a double-breasted suit with just two buttons, as was the model I had made in Hong Kong recently. While I have seen this design around occasionally over the years, it was most recently in the spotlight in Dunhill’s spring/summer campaign. Here a two-button double-breasted suit was used as a separate jacket with dark jeans and dark-brown derbys (not sure I quite agree with this look – a double-breasted looking rather out of place as an odd jacket – but it did seem to work on the fellow in the advert) and as a modern twist on a white linen suit worn by Jude Law.

Getting rid of the double row of buttons helps avoid the boxy look wonderfully. There is, obviously, now a single horizontal line across one’s waist, but it is at least a slim line. It all helps accentuate my breadth and ease those youthful insecurities.

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Fashion Rolls in Its Own Muck

Apparently, there’s a war on. It’s a war of attrition, as designers from both sides throw model after model down the runway. They are battling for our wallets. The two entrenched sides are – again, apparently – narrow trousers and baggy trousers.

According to a feature in the Financial Times, on one side are Dolce & Gabbana, Dries Van Noten, Galliano, Antonio Marras, Vivienne Westwood and Giorgio Armanni. These apparently favour the baggy trouser, though I’m sure I’ve seen narrow suit trousers on D&G models just as frequently as wide ones. On the opposing side are Burberry, Roberto Cavalli, Daks, Costume National, Fendi, Prada and Marni. Though I’ve yet to try on a Daks suit that has narrow or cropped trousers.

Whatever the truth of it, this war feels like the fashion world rolling in its own muck. Having created a world that obsesses over people and brands, and insists on changing the hot new item every few weeks, fashion can now create its own little battles and stories, its own tiffs, face-offs and fights, all played out in an entirely artificial world.

The situation isn’t helped by fashion journalists. You can see them all crowding around the catwalks, all desperately looking for “this season’s trends”. They all have to go home and right exactly the same feature: what the runway shows mean you will be wearing (or should be wearing) next season. Because there are so many designers, with so many different ideas, a trend is hard to find. So journalists frantically cobble together examples from different shows, shoehorning one look into a trend. Sometimes journalists just give up – GQ’s coverage of the spring/summer shows went with theme of celebrating diversity.

Men’s suit trousers are the pinnacle of this self-involvement. Granted, trousers change over time. Jeans are narrower than they were three years ago. But suit trousers rarely change that much. Perhaps they lose or gain pleats, or cuffs. The rise has certainly lowered in the past ten years. But the idea that they are that affected by fashion is ridiculous.

Suit jackets are complicated. The number of buttons, width of lapels and padding of shoulders does change significantly. Ten years ago it was cutting edge to have four buttons. Today that figure is one. It’s not hard to work out what the man interested in permanent style should do: go for two or three. Equally with shoulders, lapels or vents – pick something that suits you (don’t go for a very natural shoulder if you already have rounded shoulders, like me) and stick with it through fashion changes.

But trousers aren’t complicated. They should be straight, not wide or skinny, and pleats/rise depends more on your figure than anything else. This (apparent) war just doesn’t affect men and their formal dressing at all. Ignore it and move on.

Pictures credit: men.style.com.

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The Alternative to Black Tie

Every year, I have to host four awards ceremonies. Three of these are in March, in quick succession. As a result, I have always hired black tie from the local Moss Bros. It never seemed worth buying my own, given that I would only wear it four times a year and one hire would do for three of them. Plus if I were to buy a new suit, there was always one I would rather have than black tie – one that I would get more use out of.

But this hired outfit was awful. Constructed from a manmade material designed to repel stains, it was stiff, shiny and may even have crinkled. And as it was off-the-rack, it didn’t fit. As men tend to notice more when something is too tight, rather than too loose, the jacket was far too large around the stomach.

To the rescue came Alan Flusser, he of previously recommended book Dressing the Man. In his section on dinner jacket alternatives, he tells us that the odd jacket was perfectly acceptable as black tie, as long as it maintained similar texture and structure to the full suit. The first obvious material was velvet, usually in black and worn with black wool trousers. His illustration shows Douglas Fairbanks escorting the Duchess of Kent in just such a velvet jacket, complete with white handkerchief and monogrammed slippers.

Now I couldn’t get away with monogrammed slippers, but a velvet jacket seemed perfectly possible. And as if to bless the discovery, I already had both black wool and black linen trousers. The black linen, if sufficiently ironed, might do very well at the two events held in hot climates – Hong Kong and Dubai.

So I conducted a short search of the vintage shops in Covent Garden, and discovered a lovely two-button jacket in Rokit. The shoulders fitted perfectly. The waist was far too large and the arms too long, but a quick trip to my tailor solved that.

The jacket itself cost £30, as did the tailoring bill. So for £60, the same price as two hires of a black tie suit from Moss Bros, I had a fully working outfit I could wear to all four events. Plus, I had a black velvet jacket that could be worn to parties, with perhaps dark jeans and a sombre shirt.

I include a photo of me at this year’s event in the ensemble. I think it looks good, but do please be kind with any comments.

(P.S. The other advantage of a velvet jacket is that your outfit is ever-so-slightly different to everyone else’s. There’s a certain satisfaction in that. Plus, the snob in me hopes one day someone will pick me up for not wearing correct black tie, and I can triumphantly quote Mr Flusser to him. For the sake of my humility, I hope that never happens.)

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