Men's Style: The Thinking Man's Guide to Dress

SUITS All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify. ERVING GOFFMAN You need one. I don't care if you work in your basement. I don't care if you're an artist. A grown-up man needs at least one suit for special events. And once you have one, a good one which fits you and doesn't make you feel constricted and displayed like a prize cake, you will wonder why all your clothes aren't suits. You will want to buy three more. The standard men's uniform of loose but sober jacket and trousers is a remarkable confidence-giving garment: people will treat you differently when you are in a suit; they will look at you differently, they will ask your opinion, they will expect you to take care of trouble. Women like men in suits. They may tell you otherwise particularly if they are associated with a university in some way, or artists. Academics and students in, say, English, or philosophy, may squeal with disgust at the idea of a "dressed-up man"; artists will giggle, as if the idea is just embarrassing. This is because in these circles to admit attraction to a man in a suit is to betray the solidarity of one's working-class comrades and to delay the inevitable revolution. "Suit" is synonymous with "fascist baby-eater," or at the very least "insensitive boor" or "uptight suburbanite." Obviously the honest expression of aesthetic response and/or sexual desire in these circles is not going to be exactly unfettered. In other words, don't believe a word of it. I have found that there is almost no woman, no matter how many pairs of Birkenstocks she owns, no matter how devoted to her organic garden, who does not react with some slight tremor of the heart, some mild increase in blood pressure and dilation of the pupils, on seeing a man particularly her own man emerging from a cocoon of olive cotton and stepping forward in the sober costume of authority, his shoulders squared, his posture righted, with crisp collar and cuffs. Part of the bad rap of suits, among bohemian men and women alike, is that our ostensible nonconformists never seem to picture good suits. They always imagine bad ones: the ones their dad or their first husband wore to tense family events; they picture green double-breasted ones, or pale grey pinstripes with a waistcoat and slightly flared trousers, all of them hot and stiff and shiny and looking like faded posters for movies set in Atlantic City in the eighties. I have often taken men, highly resistant men, shopping for their first grown-up suit. They have tended to be artistic types, writers usually, who have managed to make it well into their thirties without leaving their teenage uniform of jeans and running shoes, and who on occasion have never even learned to tie a tie. Each required a new suit for a special occasion (a wedding, an interview, a book tour), but I think each had also come to a stage in his career that made the suit symbolic of a decision to embrace a new kind of life, a life of success that would have a public component. In short, adulthood. The procedure was for them fraught with misgivings both ideological and aesthetic. Several of them had old suits hanging in their closets, suits which they had been forced to buy by parents or bosses in previous lives (double-breasted and green) and which they felt they had to wear, like a kind of absurd, lit-up party hat, as one of the penances of certain excruciating obligatory events, such as weddings or graduations or EasteSmith, Russell is the author of 'Men's Style: The Thinking Man's Guide to Dress', published 2005 under ISBN 9780771081255 and ISBN 0771081251.